There's a lot new in this major update: multitenancy support in Orchestrator, central deployment, APIs, support for Java desktop apps, the "Web Scraper" tool, a completely reworked Chrome extension, and much more.

Main Changes

1. Many improvements in Orchestrator: multitenancy, central deployment, APIs, and more.
2. Significantly improved and expanded browser functionality: working with Google Chrome is now possible entirely through the ElectroNeek Chrome Automation extension, a new tool "Web Scraper" has been added.
3. Added a large number of new activities to work with Excel, PDF and other applications.

Important

The new 6.0 version contains changes that affect backward compatibility. These changes are support of "multitenancy" and "central deployment" - this affects Studio Pro, Bot Runner, and Orchestrator.

All active customers with a purchased Orchestrator product will not get the update automatically. When logging into the user portal, you will see information about the update and be able to download detailed instructions on how to properly prepare for the update.

You must upgrade to version 6.0 within four weeks of the release date of the new version, i.e. from August 17, 2021. After four weeks, the upgrade will be done automatically.

Complete changelog

Improvements

Studio Pro

1. The grouping of activities in Studio Pro has been completely redesigned to make it easier to navigate. There are fewer groups, and each group now has subgroups.
2. Completely redesigned the the ElectroNeek Chrome Automation extension:
   • Studio Pro can now work without using Selenium. From now on, the "Chrome Native" method will be the primary way to work with the Google Chrome browser.
   • The "Chrome Native" method allows you to interact with a browser that is already open.
   • "Chrome Native" makes it unnecessary to specify the browser tab number: the platform will automatically detect the tab with the desired item. The ability to specify a tab explicitly is preserved.
   • Now the extension works faster.
   • To ensure compatibility with the algorithms created in previous versions of the platform, the ability to work through Selenium remains.
3. A new tool - "Web Scraper" has been released. This tool allows you to read an array of structured data from a web page. The tool consists of:
   1. A new activity - Scrape structured data.
   2. New file type - .rel, which is edited in a separate workspace with a different list of functions.
   3. You can find a detailed guide to using the tool here.
4. Studio Pro now supports desktop applications written in Java. The required plug-in is installed with the platform and the Desktop Picker is used to interact with the application interface.
5. A new tool - File History... has been released. This tool allows you to save file versions, which facilitates bot development and testing: you no longer need to delete blocks, put them again or reconfigure settings - now you can simply restore the desired version of the file.
6. Added support for local scope of variables.
   1. A local scope is defined as the availability of a variable only within one .neek file.
   2. Support for global scopes was retained.
   3. For compatibility with algorithms created in previous versions of Studio Pro, all variables in those algorithms will be global.
7. There is a new group of activities - "Citrix & RDP", which consists of the "Surface Automation" and "Terminals" subgroups.
8. New Excel activities have been released:
   1. Insert/Delete Rows - inserts activities rows or removes existing rows from an Excel document.
   2. Read column - reads column data from an Excel document.
   3. Sort range - sorts the range of data in the Excel document into columns.
   4. Update Column - changes the data in an existing column in an Excel document.
   5. Insert/Delete Columns - inserts an empty column or removes an existing column from the Excel document.
   6. Append column - adds an empty column to the Excel document.
9. New activities to work with PDF-documents have been released:
   1. Combine to PDF - allows you to combine pdf, docx, xlsx, rtf, tiff, bmp, jpeg, jpg, gif, png, html, xps, html files into a single PDF-document.
   2. Get PDF page count - allows you to get the number of pages in a PDF document.
   3. Extract page range - allows you to get the page range from one PDF-document and save it to another PDF-document.
   4. Improved the Convert to Image activity - now you can specify the range of pages to convert.
10. Added a new Execute Python activity to the Programming section.
11. Improved the If...then and Do-while loop activities:
    1. If...then: this activities has a condition constructor in its parameters, allowing you to set simple conditions without using JavaScript syntax.
    2. Do-while loop: more blocks now appear on the canvas when you add this activity. Each block has comments, making it easier to understand the structure of the loop and implement it.
12. Support for the Microsoft Outlook desktop application was released. The corresponding group consists of two activities - Read emails and Send email.
13. Expanded mechanisms for working with popular APIs: added a new activity Get OAuth token, added the ability to use Bearer Token in the HTTP request activity.
14. Added support for working with Google Drive, the corresponding group consists of three actions - Download file, Upload file, and Create directory.
15. Added support for interacting with some Windows functions, added activities to the "System" subgroup - Process found?, Kill process, and Shutdown computer.
16. New OCR services support added, they allow extracting structured, semi-structured and unstructured data from documents (invoices, driver licenses, etc.).
    1. Amazon Textract.
    2. Microsoft Form Recognizer.
    3. CaptureFast OCR.
    4. Nanonets OCR.
    5. Klippa OCR.
17. Added ability to exclude selector tabs in the Desktop Picker. More details on this and on how to interact with desktop elements in general can be found in this article.
18. All email activities can now send emails to multiple recipients at once.
19. Now when you update Studio Pro through the menu, you will see a changelog to the new version if it is available.

ElectroNeek Orhcestrator SaaS and user's portal

1. Multitenancy is now available. This feature is useful for integrators who want to manage their customers' bots in a single interface, or large companies with several departments whose data should not overlap. A separate tab, Multitenancy, has appeared on the Orchestrator product page.
2. Central Deployment is now released. This means that when the bot is published in Orchestrator, the workflow will be uploaded to the cloud and stored there. This makes it possible to run this bot on other Bot Runners without having to manually transfer files or repeat the publishing process on another machine.
3. Orchestrator API is now released. The product page now allows you to generate an authorization token when using API methods.
4. The dashboards are now released. They can show data on the bots' functioning: statistics on successful runs, number of scheduled bots and their activity and other. This data can be found on the Dashboard page in the Orchestrator product.
5. Expanded the functionality of the "Billing" page: now you can change the legal data of your organization and contact persons. The design of the page itself was also changed.

Bot Runner

1. Central Deployment is now released. This means that when the bot is published in Orchestrator, the workflow will be uploaded to the cloud and stored there. This makes it possible to run this bot on other Bot Runners without having to manually transfer files or repeat the publishing process on another machine.
2. Now you can update Bot Runner through the menu item (appears by right-clicking on the tray icon). You can also see a changelog of the new version before the update.

Bug Fixes

Studio Pro, Bot Runner, Orchestrator

In the 6.0 update, we have fixed various bugs, including:

1. Fixed an issue when the "Get element property" activity would return the value null instead of 0.
2. Fixed an issue when the "Send hotkey" activity wouldn't always transfer the correct hotkey combinations
3. Fixed an issue when the "Read emails" activity would download attachments even if the corresponding checkbox was not checked. .
4. Fixed an issue when the username was displayed as undefined when adding a new user to the product.
5. Fixed an issue which made it impossible to add a user to the product.
6. Fixed an issue which made it impossible to invite a previously excluded user to the product.
7. Fixed issues that would lead the bot schedules and webhook links to work incorrectly.
8. Fixed an issue when logs of previously launched algorithms wouldn't be available when the corresponding switch was switched off

and more.