Disable microsoft office meeting popups and email notifications

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1

Hello,

I’ve noticed that robots will break for the following reasons:

  • An outlook meeting reminder pops up and covers up where a robot is trying to click
  • An email notification in the bottom right of the screen pops up and blocks where a robot is trying to click.

Can someone please guide me to how would I disable outlook notification at the start of an automation and then re-enable them at the end of one?

I’m sure I could do it via click activities but that would not be efficient. Is there a quick way to do it?

Much appreciated!

2

My recommendation is to try to use simulate click or send window messages for each click activity. This way, it won’t matter if Outlook shows a pop-up. Otherwise, adding steps to disable and re-enable outlook notifications is likely going to complicate your process.

In fact, if you can’t do simulate click or send window messages for the application(s) your working with, I suggest running a Kill Process activity on Outlook instead, and if you’d like, just open Outlook at the end of the process.

3

Yeh the simulate click and windows messages leads to other errors.

Killing the process would be too slow I think because of the outlook startup at the end.

Isn’t there a macro I can execute that will turn off and on the notifications?

4

@Asanka

If Outlook is configured dedicated to bot, then you can configure outlook by disabling the remainders

Hope this helps

Thanks

5

Yeah that won’t work. Users use bots and do their regular work.
Is there no vba code to achieve this?

6

If they’re using bots while working, their work could easily block the bot as well. It is recommended that the bot either run unattended with no user working on the machine or attended with the user only working on the machine when the bot prompts for help.

7

Yeah thats what I meant.

The user runs the bot and takes their hands off the keyboard and does not touch it until the bot finishes. However, the issue is, the email notifications cause the bot to break. Thats why I want to turn off the notifications at the start of the automation and turn them back on at the end.

Is this not possible? This seems like an issue and developer faces

8

If the user is not using the machine, there should be no harm in killing Outlook at the beginning of the process, and starting it again at the end.

Disabling only the notifications at the beginning and re-enabling at the end will make the process much more complicated.

9

Yeah the kill is not a solid solution for this. The average run time for the bots we have is about 2 mins. They are also run dozens of times a day. Restarting outlook will take about 30 seconds so adding 30 seconds to 2 min process just doesn’t seem like a solid solution.

So no one knows of any vba code to do it?

10

Oh I might have found a way to do it!

I just need to turn the focus assist (quiet mode) on and set it to alarms only. Ha does anyone have a quick and dirty way to do that without using click activities?

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11

Ah it seems for whatever reason uipath does not recognize that toolbar in the picture above. Does anyone know how to click on focus assist?

12

It is possible to click on elements on the desktop if you use screen coordinates for clicking. You can choose an element which the UI explorer recognizes, and then offset where the process clicks to click on the correct button. It might take a bit of trial and error to make sure the offset is just right, though.

I can’t say that this is necessarily stable, but it will get the job done.

13

Im realizing that I can get to it using keyboard shortcuts actually.

However, is there a way to find out if focus assist is already on? Right now I can only use keyboard shortcuts with the assumption that focus assist is off.

14

Possibly could use a get attribute activity for this:

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It is different when focus assist is on. Do you know what attribute would change on it?

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15

Oh I actually found a way!

just right click and click the one you want!

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16

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