Blue Prism 6.0: September 2017

This release has been verified as complying with the below standards by Veracode – an independent application security organization.

Static Code Analysis	VL4. Veracode Score: 100/100. Further information
OWASP	Further information
SANS Top 25	Further information

A compliance highlight summary report is available upon request via Product Support.

A number of new features and enhancements are introduced in this version of Blue Prism.

Enhanced Surface Automation

Surface Automation techniques have been extended and enhanced to simplify the building of resilient processes when using Blue Prism Surface Automation techniques to interact with applications. Optimizations are also provided that improve the performance of these processes as they execute.

Region Editor

The mechanism for defining how to locate regions has been extended. It is now possible to:

• Easily select whether the region should be found based on coordinates or an image match.
• Select the search area for a given region (e.g. anywhere on the screen, fixed position, or relative position to another region).
• When using image matching and a fixed position, a search area around the position can be defined to cater for situations where the image may be out of position within a defined tolerance.
• When using relative positioning, the run-time search area for the region will be dynamically adjusted based on the actual location of the parent item(s).
• Set an RGB color tolerance range for image regions. This allows for variance in the RGB values of the image pixel colors at run time.
• Create a grey-scale comparison of an image region. This improves the resilience of region detection when an RGB color tolerance alone cannot be relied upon.

Process Development

Process studio includes improvements to reduce the complexity when building resilient processes:

• A new check exists condition can be used in Wait stages to check that an image region is present before continuing.
• An interval can be set between actions within a navigate stage.
• An interval can be set between individual keystrokes in Send and Press Key actions within a Navigate Stage. (Global Send Keys, Global Send Key Events, Window Press Keys, Window Press Keys with ALT).

Improved Control Room

A number of improvements have been made which provide greater visibility and ease of management of the workforce. These improvements include:

• The Session Management pane now provides multi-select filters for processes and resources, and subject to being enabled, the session management pane is now auto-filtered based on user selections in the processes and resources panes.
• It is now possible to set a maximum time that a process can spend on a given stage before entering a warning state. The warning is configured on a system-wide basis with the option to define an override value per stage.
• The latest stage that was started in a process (along with the start date and time) is now clearly indicated within session management.
• Navigating away from the Control Room no longer causes the selected resource session view to be reset.
• A more prominent indication of which resource is the current resource pool controller.
• The Workforce Availability tile has been updated to more accurately reflect the status of all resources, including data on how many are logged out, working, idle, missing and offline.

The Resources panel in the Control Room now contains more detailed information about each runtime resource. The changes include:

• A new mechanism for displaying the state of the resource such as whether the runtime is idle, running, offline, missing; as well as the number of sessions that are running on each device. This is derived based on runtime resources proactively providing relevant information on a regular basis.
• Resources which are unexpectedly offline are now shows as missing, and the total time that has elapsed since the last successful connection is displayed with an upper limit of 5 minutes.
• If a resource has been set to Private, the user account which to which it is assigned is displayed.
• The connection state information that indicates whether a direct (instructional) connection can be established from the control room to a given runtime resource is now within the right-hand columns in the pane.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

The connection modes available when configuring a Blue Prism Server; and when configuring a Blue Prism client to connect via a Blue Prism Server have been extended to offer Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) options in addition to .NET Remoting. This offers increased control over the encryption that is applied to the communication channel.

The new options include:

• WCF: SOAP with Message Encryption & Windows Authentication
• WCF: SOAP with Transport Encryption & Windows Authentication
• WCF: SOAP with Transport Encryption
• WCF: Insecure

This work includes additional command line configurability for setting the connection mode through use of the /connectionmode switch.

Analytics

Session logs and configurable metric information can now be directed to external systems for cross-environment monitoring purposes. To accommodate this new functionality, the following changes have been made:

• The Dashboard tab has been renamed to Analytics. The corresponding user permission group nomenclature has also been changed to Analytics.
• A new concept of Published Dashboards has been provided. Tiles added to published dashboards will be periodically executed behind the scenes on appropriately configured Blue Prism Servers and the results will be logged into the local event logs on those devices.
• A new Design Published Dashboard permission has been provided. This restricts whether users can create and edit Publish Dashboards. System Administrators and users with the existing Design Global Dashboards permission are granted this permission automatically.
• A new application server config setting Enable Published Dashboards is provided. When enabled, the server will periodically retrieve data associated with the tiles on each Published Dashboard and write the information to the Windows event log  in JSON format for consumption by external applications. The tile with the longest refresh interval will be used to determine whether or not to refresh all the tiles on the dashboard and output their results to the log.

Exception Screen Capture

Exception stages can now be configured to automatically save a screen capture of the resource. The screen capture is saved with the date and time of the exception, the name of the resource which took the capture and the process or object in which it occurred. When using this feature, the following points should be considered:

• The functionality is enabled/disabled via a system-wide setting.
• Screen captures can only be viewed by users with the appropriate permission.
• The screen capture functionality requires that a default encryption scheme has been configured and is valid. Only the latest screen capture per runtime resource will be stored.

Multi-Lingual UI

Key areas of the user-interface can now be displayed in Japanese when the client is run on a machine with a Japanese locale.

.NET 4.7

The platform is now configured to natively use .NET Framework 4.7. This will require all devices where Blue Prism is to be installed to be configured with this version of the .NET Framework. Additionally, this provides support for using features of this framework when developing Blue Prism code stages.

Server Configuration

Several changes have been made to the Blue Prism Server configuration interface to improve usability:

• When configuring a server service, if a valid Windows Service has not already been configured, the user is alerted via the configuration interface.
• If a Windows Service had not previously been configured for a server profile, the user is given the option of using an on-screen Create Service button.
• When creating a server profile, the configuration utility now detects if a duplicate name is already configured.
• The sever profile named Default cannot be renamed or deleted.
• It is no longer necessary to use the save configuration button on the configuration home screen to save the changes which have been made.
• Server event log options are now grouped under a dedicated Logging tab.
• If the server service is configured as a WCF endpoint, an alert is presented if the service logon on account does not have the appropriate permissions. Functionality is provided that allows an administrator to add the logon account to the appropriate access control list (ACL).
• An interface is provided for associating a locally installed certificate with the Blue Prism server service for scenarios where a WCF connection mode with transport encryption is selected.

Server Deployment

• The Blue Prism Server service now operates as a 64-bit process when deployed on a supported 64-bit operating system.
• When using the AutomateC /serverconfig command to set up a new server deployment, the encryption scheme which is automatically created is now labelled 'Default Encryption Scheme'. Previously, the scheme was labelled 'Credentials Key' by default.

Mainframe Emulators

Support for interactions with mainframe emulators in multiple locales has been extended. The following changes have been introduced:

• When using the Generic HLLAPI connector, it is now necessary to select the API code page that the emulator is configured to use. This enables interactions with emulators configured to use a wide range of locales, including those which contain double-byte character sets. Existing processes will default to the ASCII encoding translator.
• Interactions with mainframe emulators which display text in a Right to Left (RTL) order has been enhanced with the introduction of an RTL spying option. When enabled, the location of the spied elements will be calculated based on the target RTL display.

Tesseract Optical Character Recognition

Tesseract V 3.05.01 is now installed with Blue Prism. Language packs from previous versions will no longer work and new language packs must be installed. Directions on how to complete this step are provided in the product Help.

A number of fixes and minor improvements are introduced with this version.

Description of change	Reference
This version of Blue Prism is certified Veracode Level 4 and is OWASP security compliant.	us-1050
When passing a Collection back from a Code Stage, if the DateTimeMode property had not been specified, the DateTime objects were being treated as being local time and subsequently being converted to UTC. By default, DateTimes that do not have a specified DateTimeMode property will now be set to UTC when passing a Collection to a Code Stage. This prevents unexpected time zone conversion.	us-867 bg-610
Session logs are now saved and viewed using the local time of the resource, and not the local time of the database server. When viewing the logs, a tool-tip translates the resource local time to the viewing user local time and also provides a UTC offset. The Session Management overview in Control Room is presented in the Local time of the viewing user.	us-879 us-999
The message presented when the context under which a runtime resource is started does not have access to the private key of a configured certificate has been updated to be more meaningful. This benefits situations where the runtime resources are started using the /sslcert switch but where the user has not been explicitly granted permissions to the private key.	bg-755
A number of changes have been made to ensure that in environments configured using Blue Prism Native authentication, the last System Administrator user cannot be deleted. It is no longer possible to delete any user that currently has a System Administrator role; and it is no longer possible to remove the System Administrator role from a user if this would leave the system without an active user with these rights.	bg-354
Any runtime resource error messages that were previously displayed in a pop-up window are now re-directed to the event log when not running in interactive mode. This primarily applies to runtimes started by Login Agent prior to being logged in.	bg-548
Resource pools can now delegate work to pool members when used in an Active Directory environment. This issue was introduced when changes were made to how anonymous resources were authenticated in v5.0.30 and has now been resolved.	bg-745
Triple DES has been retired as an encryption scheme mode. It continues to be provided for backwards compatibility. No action is required for upgrading customers who have this encryption method configured in existing encryption schemes.	us-1139
When deleting a user role in Security – User Roles, inactive user accounts are no longer counted in the message which confirms how many user accounts are assigned to this role.	bg-660
An improvement has been made to how usernames are edited in user tree-view in Security – Users. Previously, deleting characters from the username when making an edit resulted in the user account losing focus.	bg-587

A number of Visual Business Objects (VBOs) are provided within the Blue Prism release but changes are only applied when a specific VBO is explicitly imported.

Any use of these VBOs should be re-verified following an import to ensure compatibility with any change of behavior.

Object – MS Excel

Description of change	Reference
A solution has been provided which prevents processes from hanging indefinitely when Actions are being utilized and Excel has become unresponsive. If an Action cannot be completed, the VBO will now timeout. A list of Actions with the new timeout functionality is detailed below: Attach Attach to workbook Open Instance Close Instance Open Workbook Save Workbook Save Current Workbook Save Workbook As Save Current Workbook As Close Workbook Close Current Workbook	bg-723
An issue has been addressed whereby the Attach, Attach to Workbook and Open Instance Actions would not function correctly when used with a specified workbook name.	bg-822

Utility JSON

Description of change

Reference

The JSON VBO now uses an updated Newtonsoft.JSON.dll. If this version of the VBO is used, the following points need to be considered when using the latest copy of the VBO with existing processes. When binary data is used in the Collection to JSON Action, the data is now converted to "Binary":"MTAxMDA=". When this data is used in the JSON to Collection Action an output of the type 'text' will be created, containing the value MTAxMDA=. Time and DateTime data are now returned from the JSON to Collection Action using the following formats "Time":"2017-09-26T00:00:16Z" and "DateTime":"2017-09-22T10:32:17Z".

us-1184