Office365 or O365

[Ansar_AhmedAtta]

For organizations running on Office tools on-prem and the bots developed using the same, are the any considerations that need to be factored when migrating to O365 for existing as well as new bots.

[Denis__Dennehy]

My first tip would be to check with Blue Prism to ensure the version of Office you are migrating to is supported by Blue Prism.  Support for Office 2016/365 is on the roadmap. It is likely to be supported by the end of the year/beginning of next year.early this year (keep an eye on our release notes). My next tip would be to treat this the same as you would any other application or system upgrade (or Blue Prism upgrade for that matter).  You should regression test all your solutions in a sandboxed upgrade environment and allocate time to make any changes/fixes that are required.

[DavidEdwards-Da]

It depends on what the business will be using as part of Office 365.  If they are moving to no desktop Office thick clients (unlikely, but possible), then any automation that interacts with the Office suite via COM will no longer work, as everything would be web based. In my organisation we have moved to Office365 for coud hosting, but still make use of thick desktop clients. This also came with a policy change that robot/non-users were no longer allowed to be created within Exchange, so we no longer use MAPIEx and have built an object that talks to Exchange Web Services.

[Ansar_AhmedAtta]

Thank You Denis for sharing the roadmap. Understand the ROM model and change management cycles. David, we never recommend using Outlook for any automation as then you have system / machine dependency. Our suggested approach is always a mailbox using a smtp connection. A dedicated mailbox for RPA needs. And avoid html content like tables etc as far as possible in email body to be fetched, read. Regarding the rest of office suite, when it moves to cloud, do we just need to to treat them like any other web app or is there a better best practice around it ( till Blueprism formally supports it).    

[Denis__Dennehy]

I doubt MS will be releasing an API for their cloud office apps anytime soon that is anywhere near as rich as the mature COM objects that are available for their desktop versions.  I think that for the foreseeable future David's suggestion that you should have full local installations of the Office apps for RPA, even if the rest of the organisation moves to cloud, is definately the correct recommendation.

[Denis__Dennehy]

I doubt MS will be releasing an API for their cloud office apps anytime soon that is anywhere near as rich as the mature COM objects that are available for their desktop versions.  I think that for the foreseeable future David's suggestion that you should have full local installations of the Office apps for RPA, even if the rest of the organisation moves to cloud, is definately the correct recommendation.

[SaptarshiSengup]

We are using the Email SMTP/POP3 VBO to read emails from O365 mail server which uses SSO authentication. Please find attached the details we are providing and the subsequent error that we have received. Can you please advise?