Reading MS Outlook emails during Internet outage

[SindujaNehruji]

Hi,

we have a process to read emails on timely basis and whenever there is internet outage, the emails go unnoticed. Is there an internal feature using which the internet connection could be checked first and then proceed to read the emails? so this way, we could avoid reading mails when there is no internet.

Thanks in advance.

[expertcr]

Thank you for your message.
Our MS Outlook VBO doesn't include a function for this.
My suggestion is to use other tools and check the results looking for a specific result.
Something link PING an external IP on the internet or webpage if the response is negative, you will know there is an issue with the internet connection and take action accordingly in your process.

[SindujaNehruji]

Hi Luis. Thanks for the response. one more question. Is there a way to ping MS exchange server via Blue Prism?

[steven.boggs]

Hi Sinduja,

To address your follow-up question, there's not a native function in Blue Prism that can ping an Exchange server (like an Action in a VBO, for example), but it may be possible to create an Object that could automate using the 'ping' command from a command prompt to do this. Although the Command Prompt 'cmd.exe' cannot be directly launched by Blue Prism's Application Modeler, you can follow the guidance in this Knowledge Base article to use the out-of-the-box 'Utility - Environment' VBO and place the commands to be run in a batch file, then place the full path and filename of the batch file into the 'Application' input parameter field.

However, I would second my colleague Luis' suggestion to use an external tool which can check the status of a server, then create your own VBO for this tool to automate validation of the results, then incorporate this into your Process to run at an interval and take action accordingly depending on the result.