Working Remotely with UiPath

Help
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Hi All,
Does anyone of you have experience working remotely on automate process with UiPath?
I’m currently enrolled on the Academy and doing the courses there and this doubts just come up since my clients are in US/Europe and work for they based in Argentina.

I’m aware of understanding the process to be automated is key and for that I do think that it is needed to be at the client site with the key users and the PMO for this, also for UAT and going live. But what about to develop the automation at home?

Lets suppose that I got all the information needed to automate a process (PDD), I have access to all the software involved, VPN, Orchestrator, etc. What other aspect should I have into account to be able to continue the development of the RPA process at home Site? Any restriction, limitation?
Am I able to install what I developed at home into any other computer/server?

I really appreciate to have your experience on this :slight_smile:

Thank you!

2

Hello.

This is from my experience and understanding.

Windows OS gives users the freedom to set their own personal settings, so I believe the biggest headache with developing on your machine in your own environment is that the settings will need to be restricted to mirror the same settings with where the process will be running on. This can result is many re-coding sessions while trying to migrate your newly developed project over to a client’s environment. For example, simply having Chrome save downloaded files to a default location automatically (which is a default setting) will not be ideal for a client where you may need to change the setting to prompt the user where to save the file.

Another big headache would be if your machine is running with different versions of the Windows OS or other Applications. Simply coding on Windows 10, then trying to migrate a project to work on Windows Server 2012 for the client might set you up for some failures and difficult troubleshooting steps.

Also, the amount of dialogues and popups that can occur in certain environments can be overwhelming to try and code for every single scenario where a setting might be different in one environment than another.

So mirroring the settings the best you can, would be ideal and mitigate some of these concerns.

Additionally, coding on a laptop display will have a different resolution than if you code using a Monitor. So keep that in mind while coding for interactions that require images and pixels to be located in a particular size. Technically, you can code for all possible resolutions, but like I said, this can become overwhelming to always need to do that.

From my own personal experience, as a coder that is internal to the company rather than a consultant, I will typically use VPN and create a remote connection to our environment where our processes run. So I am basically remoting in… I’m not sure if maybe the clients could set that up for developers to utilize from home.

Lastly, remoting or using a virtual machine is a MUST for automation and RPA, because while you are testing and running processes, you are practically unable to perform other tasks… not ideal for associates with many other things they could be doing, or even developing other RPA components at the same time as testing.

—However,
I believe this is something that could improve in the future, being provided an environment to code in rather than your own personal desktop. Like a Cloud Machine of sorts, and is managed by a third party to create a consistent and reliable environment that never crashes. That is something I have been hearing about anyway.

Sorry for my long replay :grin:

Regards.

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Hello ClaytonM,
Thanks to your very clear and “long replay” now I’m more confident that I can figure out somehow to do this remotely.
So to sum up my big concern should be to have the same workspace of the user PC to avoid issues related to SO settings and this could be figured out using a remote desktop, such a great idea! Adding to this if remote desktop is not available I could get an image of the machine and install it on my computer in a VM … thinking.

Thinking more about this, this problem shouldn’t be only working remotely as if we always depends on user’s computer in which the user needs to keep working meanwhile we develop the automation we will always be facing issues like this, don’t you think?

Thanks again for your help I really appreciate :slight_smile:

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I think your wording here was a little confusing. But, I can say I was mainly pointing out the challenges of developing for a server with high-density robots. For “Attended” robots, that brings more challenges, because if you develop something to run on someone else’s logon session while they are there, it is running on their own personal space where they may change settings that could in the future impact your automated process from being successful.

And, I also don’t think restricting users to a specific set of settings is the answer either (because I fight for freedom of expression even with computer settings). I believe if we can find a way to get around these concerns through technology rather than limitations, that would be ideal. But, it’s almost like we need to create reusable components that are very well-thought out that are developed to get around all these setting scenarios. :sweat_smile:

To the point of always having a Remote workspace for development. I think it’s necessary for some projects where it might take 3 minutes per item so for 100 items, that’s 5 hours! On the other hand, you can set up testing to only perform certain items that present various logical decisions to make sure all situations are successful. But then again, how do you know which ones need additional testing without testing all items in a set of data.

I do know that there were some RPA options outside of UiPath that would actually create its own virtual environment on the machine. This would solve this for most part, however, the disadvantages I think are great, because you couldn’t view the process running and installing changes to applications or settings would become more time-consuming. The reason I bring this up, is because what if an “Attended” job could run on the same user session but in a virtual copy of their environment. This would allow users to not interfere with the job. But time will tell to see what cool ideas come to solve these concerns in the future!

Regards.

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You’re right I was confusing about attended vs unattended but now I have a better landscape of the challenges that I would face.
I like your thoughts and ideas of having freedom and I think that virtualization could be the best approach so far.

I really appreciate again your reply, it is really helpful.
Regards

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Hi GabiBold
I am now in the same position as you were in Oct last year. How did the remote development turn out for you? Are you currently developing remotely? Any advise that you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks