Crisper Learning: For UiPath

INTRODUCTIONIT SEEMS A THING OF THE PAST that you had to do all the manual work repetitively in a firm, surging only your stress, monotony and nothing in terms of your knowledge, skillset and cleverness. With progression of information technology in today's era, the ask from professionals is to work smarter and not just harder. Developers are inclined to learn more sophisticated and better tools and not stay working in the same dead-end job. This is where the realization of automating the repetitive manual processes came into picture. Optimization of your work and effort needed in it would ultimately result in a more productive use of your time. And just like other technology developments, this didn't happen overnight as well. It took years of research, prototypes, small niche products that ultimately led to the formulation of software robots.The term "Robots" has been prevailing for decades in our community and has a connotation of mechanical parts, when put together, accomplish their assigned tasks. For this, let me make it clear that this book is not going to deal with such Hardware robots. It's not a physical device sitting in front of your system doing work for you. Robots have disparate conformations. A computer in itself is a robot, providing you the capability to create, maintain and remove your documents. Similarly, a phone can be termed as bot providing capabilities to make calls, work on business software applications utilizing touch interfaces any many more. Just a couple of years back, for people like us, it was difficult for comprehend the fact that doing a full-fledged accounting and management business over a PC system would be possible. But in today's world, you would see even toddlers handling refined IT products such as laptops, i-phones, smartwatches etc. with ease.Software Robots or Robotics Process Automation is the process of imitating the job a normal person would do in front of a computer system. It is the first step to building the Artificially Intelligent operations, which would be nothing but programmed bots accompanied with cognitive abilities. RPA provides an advanced substitute to improve productivity while being cost-effective and accurate through automation of rule-based, back-end administrative processes. When several bots work together in an office environment, this arrangement is called "virtual workforce". The virtual workforce is deployed via an operational team and is usually managed by the firm employees who implemented it. There are quite a few vendors in market today providing tools with various automation capabilities. The major ones among these include: UiPath, BluePrism, Automation Anywhere, IP Soft, WorkFusion, NICE, BlueWorks Live, Exilant, Xerox, Celaton, PEGA Systems and Kofax. In this book, we'll be dealing with UiPath, one of the most sophisticated tools available today that delivers basic, desktop, web and citrix based automations.