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Darshan Hiranandani : Exploring Phone Call and SMS Options in Blue Prism

Hi Team,

We are considering using Blue Prism for notifying users via phone calls or SMS when an error occurs in our processes.

1. Phone Call Functionality:

  • Does Blue Prism have built-in support or integrations for making phone calls? If so, what are the recommended approaches?

2. SMS Messaging:

  • Can Blue Prism be configured to send SMS messages? What external services or integrations are required?

Questions for the Team:

  1. Call Function Integration:
    • How can we set up Blue Prism to make phone calls? Are there specific services or configurations needed?
  2. Sending SMS:
    • What are the options for sending SMS messages through Blue Prism? What are the steps to configure this functionality?
  3. Error Notification Implementation:
    • What best practices should we follow for setting up automated phone call or SMS notifications for error alerts in Blue Prism?
  4. Technical Setup:
    • What technical considerations should we be aware of when integrating phone call or SMS functionalities with Blue Prism?

Any suggestions or solutions you can provide would be very helpful!

Thanks,
Darshan Hiranandani

2 REPLIES 2

Check out Twilio Assset on Digital Exchange and check their API and features. You can integrate API with Blue prism easily for any 3rd party such services - https://digitalexchange.blueprism.com/dx/search/?keyword=twilio&page=1

david.l.morris
Level 14

Tejaskumar_Darji provided a good succinct answer. I'm just going to add a bit because of your various questions.

First, as implied already, Blue Prism does not have features related to SMS or phone calls. The same is true for pretty much any notification method you can think of. Blue Prism leaves that up to us as developers to implement as we need rather than providing a built-in solution for it.

That means that what anyone would respond with in terms of how to implement SMS or phone calls would be the same across any automation tool, except for the names of the areas of the tool and such.

So, here are some things to consider off the top of my head, some of which are prompted by your questions:

The first thing I should mention is that if you haven't built in notifications into Blue Prism before, this will seem perhaps a bit unexpected. You might be thinking "I'll just turn on something that will send notifications when processes terminate." But, as far as I'm aware, there is no built-in way to trigger even 3rd party services upon a termination. Blue Prism's built-in feature for notifications is called Process Alerts, but this is only good for when people are sitting at their computers, logged in, with Blue Prism process alerts running on that machine so they can receive notifications through it. Apart from this, typically what we do in Blue Prism is build an object or objects that can be called by Processes whenever they determine they are having a problem. We usually do this by use of a Main Page Recovery Path which then calls an object which calls a 3rd party service to send an email or SMS or whatever. What it boils down to is that Blue Prism process must be running in Control Room while the notification is being sent. I imagine this may change at some point in the future, but I believe this is still the case. So, you should plan to build the logic into an object and call this object from every automation when it is about to terminate.

All that said, you absolutely could implement something that will monitor Blue Prism for you and notify you of problems. This would be an external tool, either one you build or one you pay for. The one I'm most familiar with is C TWO (previously called RPA Supervisor). There are other tools as well. But the point here is that this tool is configured to control Blue Prism as well as to monitor it and fire off notifications when there are issues. It also helps with efficient use of Blue Prism licenses and runtime resources, but that's not what you're asking about.

In the end, if you want to go with the absolute simplest way possible to handle this, then here are the pieces I imagine you need: (1) get a subscription to Twilio or something like it, (2) build an object called perhaps "Notifications", (3) make an action or set of actions that can be called in this object from the processes when they are about to terminate and this object should be designed to call Twilio's API, (4) update all your processes to call this action on their Main Page recovery path.

Alternatively, you could just build a utility process in Blue Prism that runs constantly or runs every few minutes. It could query the Blue Prism database for recently terminated sessions and then send the appropriate SMS messages or make phone calls. This could use some kind of input from Excel or whatever that you use to configure the importance of each automation so that you can use a kind of escalation logic.

I'm sure it's obvious by now by all this explanation, but the point is that in Blue Prism, while it is pretty easy to make logic in Blue Prism, you would need to configure all of it yourself for this kind of use case as Blue Prism does not attempt to handle notifications. I should say it doesn't yet at least. None of my comments relate to Blue Prism Cloud or Blue Prism Next Gen, as I don't use or have access to either of those.


Dave Morris, 3Ci at Southern Company