Integration with Microsoft Office 365

[AndrewPascal]

Anyone have any experience of migrating robots to Office 365? The requirement to sign in when first opening Office is hard to automate around. The intermittent requests to re-enter email address and password are even worse. Does anyone have any successful strategies? Have you tried Microsoft's RPA Unattended licence for O365?

Any suggestions gratefully received!

[nthnhwrdprmn]

@AndrewPascal We are about to embark on an upgrade of our bot VMs from Office 2016 to O365. We were advised by both Blue Prism support and Microsoft to install the unattended license version of O365 for the very reasons you brought up.

Once we have one bot VM upgraded with the unattended license version of O365 and have conducted some testing, I will try to report back here on our experience and results for the benefit of this community.

[AndrewPascal]

Thanks @nthnhwrdprmn. We investigated the O365 "RPA Unattended" licence, but we were still getting the sign-in dialogue. Microsoft support told us that was expected, which makes absolutely no sense to me. If you (or anyone) can get it working, I would dearly love to hear about it. Office 2016 end-of-life is getting painfully close!

[AndrewPascal · Accepted solution]

Well, in the end we've scrapped Office 365 and upgraded to Office 2024 instead. You can buy per-device licences, install them on a key management server and carry on using Office exactly as before. A bit late to be of help to most people (11 days to end of support now!), but that's the solution we found - and you might not have heard of it, because MS don't like to publicise the existence of non-365 versions of Office!