End User wants to run Blue Prism process

[ParnabSinha_Cho]

Hi,

We have a demand where end user wants to run a Blue Prism process on demand. We have other processes also in production and we do not want end users to access production instance. Is there any way by which we can enable end users to trigger the Blue Prism process without giving them access to open/launch Blue Prism.

Thanks,
Parnab

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Parnab Sinha Choudhury
RPA Developer / Business Analyst
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[HarshitRawat]

One idea which comes to my mind is to provide batch scripts with command line arguments to the users , so that they can just double click them whenever they want to start a process.. i can provide a sample to you in case you are interested

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Harshit Rawat
Senior RPA Consultant
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[ArtursTrofimovi]

If you do not mind investing in another piece of software, check out RPA Supervisor. You can create a user account for the business and set necessary account restrictions. The user will be able to log in via the browser and manually start the process on demand. In addition, it is a nice tool that will make your controller life easier.

Here is the link to RPA Supervisor: https://www.rpasupervisor.com/

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Arturs Trofimovics
Old Mutual
Old Mutual
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[Kishore_KumarDe]

You can check Blueprism Interact product. It is free to use but you will need to do some setup. It is built for the same purpose of allowing end user to run the process.

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Kishore Deka
Lead Software Engineer
EPAM systems
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[bruce.liu]

Hi Parnab,

You can consider following mechanisms:

1. Expose BP process/object as process and invoke it using SOAP web service calls. (requires BP credentials)
2. Use Blue Prism Command Line (requires Blue Prism installation and BP credentials).
3. Interact, but please do note that Interact is NOT a free product available to all customers. I would advise to contact your Blue Prism account manager if you wish to know more.
4. Wait until Blue Prism v7 where REST API endpoints may be offered.

One issue with those mechanisms is that they are not necessarily user friendly. It almost needs a tool/UI to make human access much easier.

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Bruce Liu
Senior Product Consultant, Professional Services
Blue Prism
Australia/Sydney
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[PvD_SE]

Hi Parnab,

Let's get wild, DIY time! :)

In theory, you could create yourself a simple but nice DIY solution. Start by creating a new process that does nothing but read an XL file, execute its data, remove the newly read data from XL and then wait a while before reading the XL again to do the same as before.

The XL can contain the name of the process to be started and the parameters to be used. If data was found in the XL, the new process will start the process requested to run with the provided parameters.   

Starting the requested process implies hard-coding the call to the processes you want to run this way. The new process will contain a Choice stage for the different processes to be started. The new process picks the appropriate process and parameters via the data from the XL. After the process has been run, the XL row will be removed by the new process.

Your end-user can enter the process-data in the XL, save the XL and the new process will pick it up and run it. You could even pimp it up by building a nice web or GUI front-end for populating the XL.

All of this is quite basic and only suitable for application in small volumes. But, as usual with DIY, the costs are low!

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Have fun!
Paul
Sweden

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Happy coding!
Paul
Sweden
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[ParnabSinha_Cho]

Hi All,

Apologies for the delayed response. Thanks for all the wonderful suggestion. For now we have decided to run the process via support team but for the long run we want to explore the option to allow user to run the process.

I will go through all the suggestion and find out the best possible way we can enable end users to run process on demand.

Thanks,
Parnab

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Parnab Sinha Choudhury
RPA Developer / Business Analyst
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[Walter.Koller]

We also made some thoughts on empowering users to run their processes without them accessing Blue Prism directly.
Unfortunately Control does not fully support multi-team set ups.

CLI has the advantage to take advantage of SSO but on the other hand needs a local Blue Prism installation.

The HTTP interface could be used instead but it does not support SSO and someone has to build the post request for starting a process. Instead of SSO also user/password could be used but this is most of the time not wanted.

Exposing a process as web service utilizes the HTTP header authentication but again someone has to build the SOAP request for starting the process.

HTTP and SOAP request could be automatically generated with a small program which could be then provided as eg XLS-Addin or integrated in some existing portal .... authentication will still be still be the dark spot on this approach.

We didn't have the chance to have a look at Interact but we have some hopes to use it for the purpose of starting processes (and a lot of other things too).

Another option is to use trigger files. One was already mentioned, using XLS file with the capability to dynamically start different processes and provide parameters at the same time. A more simple version is to just look for a file (name) and start one specific process if this file exists. The disadvantage is, depending on the frequency of checking for the files(s) it can consume quite some resources (especially when done with Blue Prism as it will consume some portion of a license).

One option, not yet mentioned, is using mail to trigger the process. Of course there are dozen of ways to create some server side, client side, ... and I don't even know what. But actually a quite simple approach is to use Outlook events.
Create a mailbox and create a rule based on subject, sender, ... when a mail arrives and the related action is to run a command. This ways it is quite dynamic and open for everyone to use by applications they already have. It would be even possible to run a process by sending a mail from your smart phone.

Regards

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Walter Koller
Solution Manager
Erste Group IT International GmbH
Europe/Vienna
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