Running Unattended robot on Windows Server VMs and Microsoft Office 365 Challenge

Help
1

Hi All,

We are trying UIPath for the first time in our company and our production implementation plan is to run the bots on Windows Server VMs as we dont have VDI infrastructure.

We have downloaded and tested a Robot successfully on Windows Server VM against a community Orchestrator but came across a rather unexpected issue that supporting softwares like Windows Office 365 suite ( Excel, Outlook etc) arent provided on server VMs as they are more for Client OS. We did our development on laptop (Windows 7 ) and hence this wasnt an issue.

So I would like to know whether
a) People do run unattended bots on Windows Server VMs and if so
b) How do they get MS Office on server VMs or some other workaround is used for sending reports, creating excel sheets etc.

Any information is much appreciated. Thanks

2

Hi Buddy @SandeepJan

Great, Being in client server always takes us to these sort of issue, its getting common, Alright so coming to the point MS Office packages like word, excel and outlook suite can be handled with uipath even though you dont have them installed how…

  1. For excel, files like xlsx and xls type can be created with some activities like Excel application scope, read range and write range …manyothers…these are used when excel is been installed with the server…IF not we do have other activities in uipath like workbook activities with read range and write range
    image

  2. To send email we dont need outlook to be installed we have other options like send exchange mail and get exchange mail activities and get imap mail activities and many other activities that can send and get the mails but you need the serverdetails and credentials to get connected

Hope this would help you buddy

Cheers

1 Like
3

Thanks for the quick response. Our usecase includes reading an excel file and perforing data entry to a website. So for that usecase what can we do ?

Also for emails, I was looking at the SMTP server setup for sending emails even though outlook integration is much easier. however for usecases of reading emails from mailbox what option should we use.

1 Like
4

Buddy @SandeepJan
Reading exces can be done with other activities like workbook activities, as the excel activities are exclusively made for excel and it works only when they are installed

Like wise to send and get mail, yes buddy you are right outlook activities has lot of advantages like filtering and we dont need to enter many details related to the server and port and even our credentials…but its not like these filteration and other purposes cant be attained from other activities buddy…we have send exchange mail activity which would be very useful in many cases like when we send mail with outlook we might be getting some popup to allow sending mail for trust mail centers enabled…and if we have other options like we can move the mail from one folder to another and save attachments, attach table with mail as html body …many other. So we will never loose the special operations that we can get from outlook activities with the other mail related activities…

Hope this would help you buddy, thats really a good question

Cheers.

1 Like
5

but its not like these filteration and other purposes cant be attained from other activities - that’s a promising statement.
I think the key point is to ensure we develop in a similar setup as of that of how the robot runs. We havent yet looked into other email capabilities and need to understand the process of getting email server host and port details from our Exchange mail team.

Do you have similar suggestion for sharepoint as we have to upload our final report to sharepoint as well. In development machine outlook and other office365 apps uses our developers login but in servers this wont be available as robot users will not having any Office 365 account.

6

Yes buddy of-course we can send the files you want either in these ways like onedrive folders synced to your server by using move files with the onedrive folder path as input being mentioned…or if we have ftp servers accessible we can upload with ftp activities and get from the server as well and that can be obtained from uipath.ftp.activities packages

Buddy atlast we got lot of options out here in uipath to explore and they were made in such a way that either of the activities can be used in either of the situations…so we do have either options, sky is the only limit…:slight_smile:
Cheers

2 Likes
7

Thanks for your help…

2 Likes
8

This topic was automatically closed 3 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.