UiPath Automation Cloud: What's Next?

[Geoff]

A few weeks ago Michael posted about some UX improvements to the UiPath Automation Cloud (the launch name for our cloud platform). Today, we want to update you on some further planned changes you’ll see rolling out over the next couple of months. They won’t all go live at once, and they’ll be fully documented when they do – but we thought you might like to know where we’re going overall – and why.

PSA: Nothing will change immediately for your existing users as we roll these changes out. Your current users will continue to have all the same permissions and capabilities without interruption. However, the way admins add new users, manage their permissions and create new tenants will all change a little.

But first, because nobody needs change for no reason, here’s what’s in it for you:

• More services: additional, optional capabilities available to your organization can be added to tenants as desired
• More granular control of your services and permissions: You can choose which services are running in which tenants, and also delegate user management of individual services or tenants to someone who is not an org admin if you wish. Please note that creating multiple tenants is feature of the UiPath Automation Cloud for enterprise, but the same principle applies to single tenant community cloud accounts, too.
• One user directory for your organization: You will invite each user to your org (the top level of your cloud account) just once, and then their permissions can be managed within each individual service.
• Complete flexibility or simplified management: 4 groups are provided ‘out of the box’ at the org level with common RPA personas. These can be configured to give specific permissions in each tenant’s services to any users added to them. This makes it easy for smaller customers to manage collections of users easily, but they are optional if you want to continue to grant permissions by user.

Here are the key changes in a little more detail:

More services

These changes make it easier to manage multiple services. As we add new services, they will be able to live in your tenants, just like Orchestrator does today, with the same tenant boundary separation benefits. If you’re on the UiPath Automation Cloud for enterprise, for example, AI Fabric will be the first additional service you see available.

Tenants can contain multiple services

You probably think of a tenant today as a convenient, secure way to manage Orchestrator services for a group of users - which it is. But why stop at Orchestrator services? Your cloud services account will be your “organization”, and for each tenant in your organization, you will be able to choose which services you want to include (Orchestrator, AI Fabric,…). If, for example, you want AI Fabric in one tenant, but not another, you can do that. There will be a new wizard to remind you that you need to choose the services you want to add to a new tenant (including Orchestrator) as you create it.

A single common directory of users - and more granular delegated control of what they can do

We will more formally separate the organizational user directory from the management of users in each service in your tenants. Today, you have to move between portal user management and orchestrator folder management to add users and give them appropriate permissions, and you have to be an org admin to do that.

In the future, org admins will continue to invite users. But once a user is added, Orchestrator tenant admins can manage permissions from within the tenant Orchestrator UX - no switching anymore and no need to be an org admin - so complete role-based separation of duties will be possible.

Groups will keep it simple (if you choose to use them)

If all this sounds very granular, well, it is – deliberately, for maximum flexibility. But we want to keep things simple for smaller and less-complex organizations too, so we are adding new groups. Using groups is optional, but can help simplify management.

Groups can be granted permissions in tenant services, just as an individual user can (as you can see in the picture above, you add a group just like you add a user in the service). An org admin can add a user to one of more of the groups at any time, including when they invite them (see the picture below). A user who has been added to one or more groups when they were invited will immediately be up and running with permissions in appropriate different services once they accept the invitation and log in.

Example: an org has one tenant, and that tenant has an Orchestrator service in it. In that Orchestrator, the org or tenant administrator can assign the necessary permissions to run automations to the “automation users” group, just once. Then, whenever the org admin invites a new user and adds them to the “automation users” group as part of the invitation, they will immediately have access to run automations in that tenant when they accept. This is a refined version of how invitations work today, and it reduces the complexity of new user configuration while also allowing delegation of permission configuration duties to tenant admins.

Modern Folders become the default

Orchestrator in new tenants will be configured and optimized using modern folders as the default and pre-configured with standard access using groups so new invited users added to groups can start using the product with no other permissions configuration required. This is only a default setting – you can add classic folders if you wish, but modern folders have many advantages and can now be used to manage both attended and unattended robots, so we think you’ll find them a useful default (see here for an overview of modern vs. classic folders).

Some additional UX improvements

Soon, we will add a new left tab to the home page, so you can find what you need grouped together logically as we add more services. Org admins will also be able to see the services they have configured in any tenant, and make changes to them if needed. Here’s a preview:

Thanks for reading! We hope this gives you some initial insight into what’s changing, why we are making these changes, and some of the possibilities they will open up. Please watch the notifications section in the UiPath Automation Cloud portal for links to what you need to know as these changes roll out in stages, and the detailed documentation. Happy automating!