Power Platform Robotic Process Automation (Part 2)

This is Part 2 of this video blog series about Power Platform Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

In Part 1, I shared a video where I demoed RPA flows being executed in attended mode. Attended mode is useful when testing your RPA to ensure that the flow is behaving as expected and clicking the right places.

However, when your RPA flow is in production you would not want it to be running it attended mode as you would need to be in a session watching over the execution of the RPA flow which kind of defeats the purpose we trying to achieve i.e. automation.Thus when your RPA flow is ready to go in production you would need to configure it to use un-attended mode. This is shown working in the video below. Unattended mode won't work if there is an active session on the machine, thus, in this case I could not use in-place screen recording to produce the video but had to record using my phone.

Another important difference between unattednded and attended RPA flows is that in order for unattended RPA flows to run you must pre-install and configure an "On-premises data gateway". The installer can be downloaded from within the Power Automate U.I. itself by clicking on the ellipses of an action of type "Run a UI flow for desktop" and clicking on "Add new connection". Inside the new window you will find a link to more official Microsoft documentation. As you can see this communication mode is very secure and, besdes being HTTPS encrypted, also supports both Azure Active Directory (AAD) and also on-prem active directory authentication for logging onto your on-Prem machine. 

The "On-premises data gateway" is also very flexible as it can be used with multiple Microsoft cloud services such as Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Logic Apps and Azure Analysis services. You can also port a gateway configuration from one machine to another (or on the same machine after a fresh OS install), view detailed diagnostic logs, restart the service, change the gateway service account and update the software from a link within the U.I. itself when Microsoft release a new version of the gateway. 

As you would see from the video it took a total of around 2 minutes to synchronize the record so you should not use RPA flows when you want to synchronize thousand or millions of records in a short time frame. It is more of a tool to replace users using or inputting data into a legacy system. When your target system has an API or BAtch import process that you could use to interact then I would still recommend to use those components rather than RPA flows.

Here is the video. Enjoy!