Used to store credentials in a native creds manager, and read / write to the manager throughput the program.
Additionally, workflow tools also provide the capability to integrate with
Very Crucial
Email Integration
Helpful for sending, receiving, extracting data, replying, forwarding, downloading attachments via email
Very Crucial
Terminal Emulators
These are still used by specific financial services institutions for middle and back office trading / securities applications. These are often low latency and hard to break in and there’s a few types that emulators can support
Very Crucial
REST & SOAP Web Services
OOTB action to interface with SOAP / REST APIs in a similar way as tools like Postman facilitate.
Very Crucial
ServiceNow
Since this is one of the most commonly used ticketing platforms, an OOTB integration largely simplifies a lot of workflows.
Very Crucial
Excel / Sheets
The most helpful integration that facilitates the following commands:
Workday facilitates SOAP based UI integrations, which is why having this integration OOTB is quite helpful for interfacing their their HR / Payroll modules as well as others. This is the most commonly used HCM for big enterprises
Very Crucial
PDF
Used to Extract text, images, fields from documents.
Additional use cases include splitting and merging documents.
Rare use cases include encrypting & decrypting documents
Very Crucial
Active Directory
Used in scenarios where the workflow indexes on a specific user identity within the enterprise. For example, this can help you build a drag and drop integration to Azure AD
Somewhat Helpful
DLL Integrations
Very archaic but there are still enterprises that leverage .NET based architecture to design applications and thus have existing functions / automations wrapped up in DLLs that can be leveraged to run custom code
Somewhat Helpful
OneDrive / Google Drive
Integration with customer’s cloud storage to upload, download, move, rename files in a similar as one can do with a local file storage
Somewhat Helpful
Calendar
Integration that facilitates identification, creation, deletion, accepting, denying meetings based upon certain rule sets.
Somewhat Helpful
Docs / Word
Natively integrate with word/ docs features such as creating documents, adding text in new paragraphs, inserting / replacing text which is helpful in workflows that require creation of such documents as outputs
Somewhat Helpful
SAP
Commonly used ERP tool across a lot of traditional enterprises which is why an OOTB integration would be very helpful
Salesforce
An OOTB integration would largely reduce any finickiness with the lightening UI, which has often been a reason for instability for UI based automation. Given their vast REST web services architecture, OOTB integration largely makes this simple
Screen & Machine Interactions
8
Get Text
Used to obtain text against specific components or from specific parts from the field. This is often used to read what is already on the screen and then trigger workflows based on the context
Very Crucial
Keystrokes
Sometimes, mouse clicks may not work as well on specific app types which is where keystrokes can be very crucial to tab through specific buttons, simulate specific text commands etc.
Very Crucial
Message Boxes
Very commonly used as a debugging tool for building workflows and also presenting outputs to a user. These can have a specific time out which makes the workflow semi-autonomous
Very Crucial
Interactive Forms
This is more of a think agent based UI layer than sits on top of the employee’s screen and takes a button, text / chat based approach to perform human in the loop actions that often require human input & review.
Very Crucial
Clipboard
Facilitates copying and pasting from the clipboard which is help especially when one leverages the clipboard as a temporary memory store beyond just variables.
Somewhat Helpful
Window Manipulation
Window manipulations includes things such as activating specific windows,closing, maximizing, minimizing, resizing, restoring.
One very interesting action has been screen titles which can actually govern workflow logic since some of the titles may contain information about the transaction iteself
Somewhat Helpful
Mouse Clicks
Simulates mouse clicks, but this may not apply to Adept since there is an independant Adept mouse pointer.
N/A (Maybe)
System Commands
Includes common commands like Shut Down, Restart, Lock Computer, Log Off
Long Term / Aspirational
Logical Constructs
5
Error Handling
Similar to how “Try-Catch” is used as of today.
Very Crucial
If / Else
For most agent workflows, this becomes quite crucial to build logic
Very Crucial
Loop
Used in most workflows since a vast majority of workflows require looping through a set of transactions
Very Crucial
Counters
Not so frequently used but more so in complex workflows. This can be thought about in a more simplistic way than a pure coding paradign
Somewhat Helpful
Fuzzy Match
This is specifically used for search functions where one has to search using a generic search term and the solution may not exactly match the search term. With an LLM architecture, this is probably going to be a lot more powerful
Somewhat Helpful
Variables / Files / Complex Coding Constructs
12
Files & Folders
This includes general file & folder management which includes creating, deleting files; getting file names, renaming, creating shortcuts, printing files, opening & closing files
Very Crucial
List
Commonly used in a variety of tasks to obtain a list of transactions / items and action them one by one
Very Crucial
CSV / TXT
Helps read and loop through a text / CSV file to identify specific coluns, data tables or processing. The output of a specific workflow can be a CSV or text file which can then trigger another workflow
Very Crucial
Data Tables
Exposes a tweakable large array variable that can be used to transform data in flight within the application.
Very Crucial
Date time
A lot of workflows depend on whether a specific data is greater than, lesser than another specific date (could be system date), and indexes on derived values such as difference in # of days, months, years etc.
Very Crucial
Inline Scripting
Used by a lot of customers to integrate existing scripts with workflows. These scripts might be doing very nuanced things like integrating with an application that only accepts VB Scripts, or Python code etc. Some common languages are:
Python
VBScript
Javascript
Somewhat Helpful
JSON
Used for storing data in JSON objects, parsing JSON data, editing, getting list of nodes, querying JSONs
Somewhat Helpful
XML
The functions are almost the same as JSON
Somewhat Helpful
Log to File
Used for conducting custom logging activties based on workflow requirements. Sometimes, the output of the workflow is a TXT or CSV log file. This commands makes it easier to append transaction outputs
Somewhat Helpful
Dictionary Variable
Helpful to store key value pairs especially in complex copy and pasting of data.
Somewhat Helpful
Boolean Ops
Used for creating logics around TRUE / FALSE
Long Term / Aspirational
String Operations
For most workflows reading data, and copy pasting it, this becomes a crucial component. Some common operations are:
Compare
Find
Length
Lowercase / Uppercase
Generate Random String
Replace
Reverse
Split
Substring
Convert variable type (Boolean, Number, Text)
Trim
Browser Actions
1
Running Javascript Actions
While our sole goal is to automate tasks in a rather low touch way, some specific apps don’t have clickable elements that are able to execute and often require running / calling a JavaScript function to work around it. This acts as a good developer tool.
Somewhat Helpful
Analytics
1
Track / Analyze
This is typically used to track the transactional value flowing through a specific variable which can then be later dashboarded. For eg. As an accounts payable specialist, trying to automate my AP process, I would like to track the invoice amount across specific vendors, to track how much I am paying over time.