Microsoft will soon add the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) feature UI Flows to its Power Automation platform. This will add extra functionality to the solution for automating workflows.
In November, Microsoft announced a number of updates to the solutions during its Ignite conference. For example, the Flow tool was renamed Power Automate to create more consistency in names with the other products in the portfolio. For example, other Microsoft products are called Power Platform and Power BI. During the conference it was also announced that UI flow became available as a public preview.
UI flow adds possibilities to automate legacy applications and manual processes. Microsoft wants to turn Power Automate into a platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to process ‘analogue data’ of, for example, invoices, automates the user interface (UI) with RPA and automates cloud applications and databases with pre-configured connectors.
Further automation
Microsoft indicates that UI flows specifically address applications that are too old or expensive to support API connectivity. Users can use the new tool to automate these applications by recording manual actions. Think of multiple mouse clicks and keyboard attacks. Subsequently, the robot can take over this action from humans. Specifically, the tech giant makes two types of RPA available for this.
Both versions come with orchestration and management options for the bots. The difference between the versions, which Microsoft describes as ‘attended RPA’ and ‘unattended RPA’, lies mainly in the amount of human input required and whether or not the bots are running on the user’s workstation.
UI flows will become available worldwide on April 2nd. In the announcement Microsoft only mentions prices in dollars. Attended RPA costs 40 dollars per user per month, while unattended RPA bots cost 150 dollars per month.
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