IE to Edge Migration

[RahulVyas]

Hello Mates, 

As everyone is aware that the IE support is ending by this June(2022). 

We have around 15 BOTs which are using browser based applications.

It would be very helpful if you could help me with your strategies, Challenges, learnings and plans to complete this migration. 
I think this will be helpful for many people who are working on this task.  

1. How much efforts we need to put after using Application modeler conversion tool?
2. Will the IE mode in edge is best short time approach we should take for existing BOTs until 2029 and slowly migrate into Edge?
3. Do IE mode in Edge requires spying again(apart from non browser elements)?
4. Most common issues faced during this migration.

I have already gone through Migrating to Microsoft Edge IE mode (blueprism.com) 

Some links to any case studies in any forum will also help.

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Rahul Vyas
RPA Developer
BNP Paribas
Asia/Kolkata
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[PvD_SE]

Hi Rahul,

We are doing the same and the work to be done is largely depending on the websites your processes have to access. In some cases the object for a given site works with only the smallest of modifications.

Mods to your object:

• The absolute minimum of modifications to the object is making it starting Edge (msedge.exe) instead of previously IE (iexplore.exe). Also, the path to the exe will differ!
• Check your application modeller elements and verify that they still work and highlight. If not: re-spy elements
• Verify if larger elements such as the browser document still highlight the same area as the IE object, some of ours did not and had to be re-spied
• Test all object actions to see if they still work with Edge IE mode, any actions not: fix
• Check any 'kill' actions that refer to 'iexplore', perhaps, but not certain, they need to be modified to 'msedge' instead. Scan the object for iexplore and you'll get the relevant ones.
• Any actions or pages with descriptions like 'Internet Explorer' can be changed to a more suitable description. Remember that renaming published page names will have larger consequences!

Edge IE mode: 
In order to get Edge to work in IE mode for your site, the URL must be defined in Edge. This has to be done for all your robots in all of their runtime environments.

In practice:
You can of course make the changes above directly in the 'IE' objects in use today. But this will cause havoc in case you need to do parallell process or object maintenance as the ongoing Edge modification will be blocking your deployment. 
Instead, I would opt for making a copy of the 'IE' object while adding 'Edge IE mode' to the name of the new object, and then make all your changes there. After you have a tested and working object, you modify the process to 'call' the pages in the new 'Edge' object instead of the old 'IE' object. Then, test again and you should be ready for deployment.
You describe having 15 processes, so I'd take the safe road with copying the 'Edge IE mode' object as described above.

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Happy coding!
Paul
Sweden
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[ewilson]

@RahulVyas,

Have you taken a look at the IE Mode Conversion Utility on the DX?

Cheers,
​

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Eric Wilson
Director, Integrations and Enablement
Blue Prism Digital Exchange
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[RahulVyas]

Thanks Paul, 

I really appreciate the time you spent to explain in detail. 

Did you use the conversion assistant or Application modeller conversion tool for this activity?
I didn't see the mention.

As far as I understand and whatever I found on the internet and the communities is 
For IE Mode in Edge.

Approach 1: 
Use the Converter or assistant tools and run the processes in the Test environments :: If there are any issues related to it Find, Fix and move Forward. 
Approach 2: 
Just run the processes Find :: If there are any issues related to it Find, Fix and move Forward. 
Approach 3:
Using conversion tool, Convert the bprelease and use Edge, not the IE mode in Edge.(This might be time consuming)

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Rahul Vyas
RPA Developer
BNP Paribas
Asia/Kolkata
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[Devendra_KumarP]

Hi Rahul, 
I would suggest look into Blue Prism Application Modeler Conversion utility.  It will save time. But you have to test properly because some element may not work after conversion.

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Devendra Kumar Prajapati
Tech Lead
Infosys
Europe/London
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[PvD_SE]

Hi Rahul,

Nope, we did not use any tool for the conversion. We only have few processes against the web and felt we could give the job a try without external tools. If you have many, like the 15 you mention, I'd have a look at the tools to see if they can save you time.

There are som entries in the BP Blog, amongst others a few by Bruce Liu, that I would strongly recommend for reading. (if you haven't already...)

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Happy coding!
Paul
Sweden
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[John__Carter]

Hi Rahul the documentation on IE Compatibility Mode here could be useful.

Accepting that Compatibility Mode will only be supported until 2029, the effort to adapt an IE VBO to work on Edge & IE Compatibility Mode should be far less effort (and risk) than fully converting to Edge. Most elements spied in IE should work in Compatibility Mode without any need for adjustment - there are points to check for (eg where the value 'Internet Explorer' appears in an attribute value) but overall most things should just work. By contrast, moving from IE to standard Edge is effectively a VBO re-write.

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John Carter
Professional Services
Blue Prism
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[RaviKumar3]

HI Rahul,

We have Hundreds of Production BOTs and we are using Application Modeler Conversion tool and it really helped a lot. Initially we did a POC on few BOTs because the each BOT is having a different in nature. We feel that even after using conversion tool we have to test the BOT by running from the control room. Very few elements we had to spy again manually. Once we satisfied in dev environment then moved the code in production and did not face much issues.

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Ravi Kumar
Sr Automation Designer
Ericsson
Asia/Kolkata
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[bruce.liu]

Hi Rahul,

Just to call out that you should use IE Mode Conversion Assistant for conversion of existing IE objects to Microsoft Edge Internet Explorer mode. It is a specialised tool that offers a fairly comprehensive conversion and reporting capability for your conversion to Microsoft Edge IE Mode. I would suggest you follow the user guide to understand how you can use various features offered by the tool in relation to some differences we called out in our official documentation. I have copied the disambiguation section below to show the different usage of IE Mode Conversion Assistant and Application Modeller Conversion Tool.

Note: While Application Modeller Conversion Tool, found on Blue Prism Digital Exchange (DX), can be customized to achieve similar conversion capability as this application, a decision was made to create a different utility for IE Mode conversion from the ground up, mainly due to the need of incorporating unique reporting requirements, which are difficult to fulfill by the Application Modeller Conversion Tool in its current design. A specialized utility ensures users can benefit from the research work done by the Blue Prism team on IE Mode to minimize manual efforts in investigations and remediations.

Please also consider review the following when using the IE Mode Conversion Assistant utilty:

1. Blue Prism IE Mode Documentation

2. Using Blue Prism with Microsoft Edge Internet Explore Mode – Supplementary Information

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

Hi Bruce, 

We tried using the IE Mode conversion tool, it is able to convert the input release file successfully.  The report generated states that there have been changes made. 

While we import, we assigned a new ID to the incoming object as well. 

However, we noticed that none of the changes mentioned in the report have actually been made to the imported object. for starters, the Process name and Path are still pointing to iexplore. Are we missing something ? Kindly help.

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Deepika Prashanth
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