Hi Alejandro,
In a nutshell - the functionality offered by both is fairly similar. They both use a numeric priority value and an SLA in the format HH:mm:ss to 'suggest' the next highest priority queue item to then be picked up using the core Blue Prism 'Get Next Queue Item' action.
BP IADA worked using a custom action to add items to a queue with a specific tag structure which would then be broken down to obtain the priority, SLA and corresponding process. When BP IADA suggests a queue item, a GUID is appended to the queue item tag and this is then used as a 'tag filter' to pick up the item via the core BP action. So, it relies heavily on the tag of a queue item to function.
BP Director works differently in that the prioritisation information (priority, SLA and process name) is stored separately in the database rather than the tag. This obviously has numerous benefits compared to the IADA approach of using the tags. When an item is suggested via Director the corresponding Item Id in the database is supplied to pick up the queue item via the core BP action using this, again eliminating the use of the tags.
I hope the above gives a good high level indication, whenever I've described it to customers familiar with IADA I'd typically position it as 'IADA 2.0'.
Now to answer the additional questions you have!
- Are they compatible with each other?
- There is a backwards compatible action included in Director that will parse the tags in the same manner that IADA does, so in short yes. The process designs that can be used with IADA/Director will probably function in broadly the same manner too, as the key difference between them both is the way the IADA/Director web service interacts with Blue Prism to suggest the next item (which is just a single step to obtain this suggestion in an Orchestration and then drive the rest of the actions off the back of that).
- Will BP Director be available on Blue Prism Cloud?
- Yes it will be available with Blue Prism Cloud.
- Is there any additional infrastructure required for IADA or Director?
- If you have a blue prism cloud platform then I believe whatever infrastructure that is required would be in place by default upon upgrading to or obtaining the latest platform build at the time of Director release (but I'll double check), in terms of on-premise I'm not 100% at the moment but I can check this also.
I hope this helps, please let me know if you have further questions - I'm more than happy to assist. 😀
