UiPath Orchestrator 2021.4 Release Preview
With 2021.4, UiPath Orchestrator tries to make your automation life easier, and we bring new features and improvements to do that.
Highlights for this edition include:
- Improved permissions model
- Share resources across folders
- Features to support the deprecation of classic folders and the switch to modern ones
- Support for RPA workflows with multiple entry points
Improved permissions model
We took a step further in decoupling tenant and folder contexts by minimizing the number of scenarios in which you need to have both types of permissions.
Roles now have an associated type set at creation time:
- Tenant roles include only tenant-level permissions
- Folder roles include only folder-level permissions
- Mixed roles include a combination of tenant and folder permissions
This enables us to filter out invalid roles for each situation. If classic folders are disabled, you can now only assign tenant and mixed roles from the Users and Roles pages and only folder and mixed roles when assigning a user in a folder.
Mixed roles can still be used and edited, but you cannot create new mixed roles. Ideally, they should be replaced by separate tenant and folder roles.
Checkout Permission Types and Role Types for details
Share resources across folders
Folders still are a great way of partitioning process deployments and separating data in Orchestrator. However, you can have some processes in a folder, with some users having access, and other processes in another folder, with different users accessing these. At the same time, some processes might require the same Orchestrator resource in order to work - for example a queue. While we already have the possibility of accessing objects from another folder via activities’ FolderPath property, this is not flexible - any change in the Orchestrator deployment configuration will require rebuilding the processes.
We want to decouple design time from deployment/execution time, so that users can create any folder structure in Orchestrator without rebuilding their packages (and be forced to re-do testing, audit, etc… processes).
An example of how this folder structure might look like:
-
./Resources - folder where we store Assets, Queues and where some users have access to edit them
-
./Attended - folder where we have some attended processes, and many users have execution permission
-
./Unattended - folder where we deploy unattended processes
For each entity found in the Resources folder, you will be able to share it with other folders that will make it possible for the processes to use it within the destination folder, without having to recreate it in every folder you need it.
The following entities might be shared between folders:
- Queues
- Assets
- Storage buckets
- Action Catalogs
See how to link queues.
See how to link storage buckets.
See how to link assets.
See how to link action catalogs.
Modern Robots on Steroids
Built with autoscaling and dynamic allocation in mind, modern folders are closing the gaps with classic.
Jobs and triggers may be created on any user/machine combination, the equivalent of “selected robots” in classic is there. You may kick in jobs on specific users, machine templates or connected machines. You may also choose the target template or machine in both time and queue triggers.
The modern equivalent of per robot assets in classic folders is here as well. You may create an asset for a specific user-machine combination.
In the modern paradigm the user-machine combinations are dynamic. There are special use-cases where for infrastructure reasons you may want to restrict which user may log in on which machine and this is now possible via user-machine mappings, fully simulating the classic robots which were, in a sense, static user-machine pairs.
In order to easily migrate without changing the key you can now attach directly to a folder, not only templates but standard machines too.
Learn more about job execution and execution targets in Orchestrator.
Multiple Entry Points for processes in Orchestrator
You can now define and run an RPA workflow with multiple entry points. These work similar to how you define parameters when creating a process. The current create/edit process dialogs have been redesigned to accommodate for the “Entry point” selection.
Enable entry points in the project’s context menu in Studio.
All features are already available in Automation Cloud or for the on-prem version, through the Insider Preview Program