Release date: 11 May 2020

What's New

Requirements Update

Starting with 2020.4, we dropped support for:

• Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2
• SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 (both Standard and Enterprise editions)
• TLS 1.0

Heads-up: Starting with 2020.10, we'll no longer support Windows 7.

Modern Folders Unattended Setup

In 2018.3 and 2019.10 we brought to you a couple of features to help decrease the deployment effort of attended environments in Orchestrator. We’re talking about floating robots, machine templates and automatic robot creation.

In this release we fully bring our solution to maturity, by turning our attention to our unattended offering. To this end, features previously available in attended scenarios only, are now valid for unattended as well. Without further ado, here are the goodies you can now take advantage of, regardless of your deployment type:

• Machine templates take over the necessity of defining a cartesian product between the sets of users and machines, in the sense that an environment with 8 users and 8 VDIs needs a configuration with one machine template and 8 robots, instead of creating 64 robots for each possible combination between the two 8-sets.
• Add automatic robot creation to that and do the math. 8 users with automatic robot creation enabled, one machine template and that’s your setup. Attach the users and machine template to whatever modern folder has the processes to be executed, and you are good to go.

This approach of attended and unattended operations, alongside modern folder support and AD integration, greatly reduces costs of infrastructure, maintenance, and consultancy for integration.

Click here for details about robots in modern folders.

Headless Processes

If you regularly work with background processes, you'll be pleased to know that from now on we no longer restrict you to executing them using distinct users. Yes, you heard that right, you can now execute as many such processes on the same user, at the same time. We also made several changes to our UI such that you are easily able to differentiate between processes that do require user intervention and those which don't, such that you can easily manage your processes and executions. Click here to check this out.

Identity Server Integration

Instead of having an onboarding and user management experience specific for each product or service, we're introducing Identity Server, our answer for centralized authentication and access control across the continuously expanding UiPath products and services ecosystem. Identity Server provides a coherent experience and parity of functionality for authentication and some aspects of authorization across our products.

Identity Server is already integrated with Orchestrator and it works seamlessly, bringing no visible changes in your daily activities. The user management experience remains unchanged, being performed within Orchestrator. External identity provider authentication is now easier to set up through Identity Server’s UI.

Behind the scenes, authentication is performed via Identity Server, which offers Single Sign-On experience across other UiPath on-premise products. This way you only sign in once and Identity Server performs the rest of the work for you when accessing other products or services. The same goes for signing out.

Click here for details about Identity Server.

Webhooks Service

Our endeavor to decouple Orchestrator into independent modules continues with Webhooks, which has been encapsulated into a separate service handling event broadcasting. There's no change to the functionality itself, and there's no extra effort required from your side. This is just another step towards improving our agility and reliability indexes, with modular control over the capabilities we provide.

What you do have to remember is that the Webhooks section in web.config has been deprecated, since webhooks settings are now handled in a new file specific to the service, appsettings.json.

Click here to learn about webhooks.

Jobs Priority

We've added the Jobs Priority feature y'all have been waiting for. You can now better control which job has precedence over other competing jobs. Higher priority jobs get the resources first and are executed before lower priority ones. Jobs with the same priority get executed in the order they've been created. That's it. Have fun!

Click here for details about jobs.

Action Center

The Tasks feature has been treated to a major overhaul. It is now called Action Center, with actions instead of tasks working as the operational units of the center.

Additionally, based on your feedback, the functionality has been augmented to incorporate a couple of new usability improvements. Explicitly:

• We added the ability to navigate from one action to another while in form view.
• You can also assign/reassign the action from within the form itself.
• After validating an action form, you have the option to automatically move on to the next one while in form view.
• Actions events can now be traced on the Logs page in Orchestrator enabling you to keep track of the action generated during a long-running job, and see whether it was completed or not.

We also introduced a new type of action, and guys, it is da bomb! What happened is we integrated Validation Station with our new re-branded Action Center. What does it mean?

To ensure no waste in terms of resources consumption while waiting for a long-running process completion, whenever user input is required in regard to reviewing and correcting document classification and automatic data extraction results, a Document Validation action is generated.

This action is to be acted upon by the user to whom it’s assigned. During the time the action is pending completion, no robot is held hostage. They can be used to execute different processes just like that. Upon completion of the Document Validation action, the initial workflow is resumed on whatever robot is available.

Click here for details about document validation actions.

Storage Buckets

Orchestrator now brings you built-in support for blob storage, using the Orchestrator database or external providers (I.e. Azure, Amazon, MinIO). These Storage Buckets are folder-scoped entities, enabling you to maintain fine-grained control over access and use of the storage and contents.

Personal Workspace

Make life easier for your Studio users and yourself by enabling the creation of a Personal Workspace for each attended user. This personal folder works as a separate, and segregated, storage space from the official Orchestrator feed. Users can then publish their packages directly to this separate space, where a process is automatically created or updated, and launch their automation quickly and easily from the tray.

Package and Workflow Compare

The Package Explorer feature got richer with compare functionalities. It now empowers you to see the actual differences between any two selected versions of a package, pointing out workflow files that were added, modified or deleted, and highlighting changes in folders or the dependencies list. Use the filters to see what interests you the most.

As a bonus , you can view the differences between workflow files . Compare the two selected versions of the .xaml file side by side, earliest file version on the left, with deleted content highlighted in red, modified content in yellow, and added content in green.

Click here for step by step instructions on how to compare packages.

Processes Display Name

This release ships with a feature allowing users to conveniently change the display name of a process. This is for all of you out-there republishing packages and recreating the processes because of a typo. We finally did it! 10/10 improved usability.

Header Color and Logo

To help you quickly and easily distinguish between your Orchestrator instances, you can now customize the header color of your Orchestrator instance at both host and tenant level, and add a custom logo as well.

Improvements

AD Integration

Adding built-in groups which don't have unique SIDs is no longer possible. See here a list of well-known security identifiers in Windows operating systems. Worry not, if you already added such groups, and want to upgrade to 2020.4, the associated users can log in just as before, the change being you can no longer add new groups.
We do, however, recommend either deleting or disabling existing built-in groups, since they might have a negative impact on your security posture.

Previously, having issues with checking AD group membership prevented an AD user from authenticating. Starting now, AD users whose inherited access-rights cannot be determined behave like local users, meaning they rely solely on explicitly-set access-rights.

Modern Folders

Modern folders become even more appealing with the introduction of the Execution Target tab when you create queue triggers. Here you can select a specific user for the process execution or leave it as Any user when having machines with multiple runtimes.

The folder path appearing on folder-scoped pages is now clickable, enabling you to quickly and easily navigate between different folders. See here for details.

Performance

If you made it this far down, you deserve to know the Robot’s heartbeat was given a lot of attention by our dev team and was rewritten from the ground up in the process. A lot of performance tuning has taken place here with craaazy improvements in response times.

Here's two things you need to remember:
Excellent ramp-up performance in Attended environments with up to 100k Robots. This translates into better performance with less resources.
Huge improvement when dealing with HD Unattended Robots. Up to 20 times better!

See below some performance touch-ups you can make yourself:

• In an effort to achieve even better control in terms of Orchestrator performance, we added the Queue.MaxSpecificDataSizeInKiloBytes setting in web.config. This parameter enables you to control the maximum size of Specific Data content for queue items, meaning that anything beyond the configured value cannot be added to a queue. Read more here.
• Keep your Orchestrator database clutter-free by running an SQL script on your Ledger and LedgerDeliveries tables. Find details here.

User Experience

We're changing the precision displayed for durations on the Monitoring menu. For example, if a job processes in 1 day 3 hours 46 minutes, we'll round it down to one day when displaying its duration in the corresponding widget. Worry not, you can still see the exact duration in ISO8601 format when hovering over the displayed value.

You can notice the changes in the Job Details Duration field, Processes Details Avg. Duration and Avg. Pending Time fields, Queues Details AHT (Per Item) field, Processing Time AHT (Per Item) and Estimated Completion fields, and Triggers Stop After field.

On the Packages page, you'll notice a new column identifying the project type, enabling you at a glance to identify StudioX created business processes and Test Suite automations al alongside traditional RPA projects.

We know that having too many columns in the column grid can be a pain, so for those of you who only want to see the most frequently used, we added a new button for controlling column visibility. By default, all columns are displayed on all pages. Click the Columns button and clear the check boxes corresponding to the columns you want to stay hidden. That's it. Have fun.

Launching your automation projects is now easier and more intuitive as we have added a convenient Start Job button on the Processes and Triggers pages.

Others

In case of an upgrade failure, the rollback feature of the UiPathOrchestrator.msi installer now also reverts any changes done to database system jobs.

Insights

Insights now supports the hierarchical folder structure of Orchestrator, meaning you can now filter all dashboards and data according to folder and/or subfolder.

Along with the folders feature, Insights now also supports Long-Running Workflows. We’ve added some new dashboards specifically designed for Long-Running Workflow data (available on Go! marketplace) and Licensing data (available OOTB).

Full support of the newest members of UiPath Platform is available in Insights with data ingestion for your StudioX, StudioPro, and Testing Robots.

The installation and tenant enablement process, and upgrading Insights, has been simplified and improved.

Breaking Changes

Starting with 2020.4, you are no longer able to start jobs or create triggers from Orchestrator on Studio or StudioX robots. While we are well aware this might bring adjustment pains, you need to know this happens in an effort to achieve a more streamlined business solution. Without further ado, this is what you need to do to keep your environment trouble-free:

• If you use Studio in production environments via unattended scheduling configured in Orchestrator, use Unattended robots instead.
• If you use Orchestrator in development environments to schedule and execute jobs on Studio or StudioX robots, use NonProduction robots instead.

Do not worry, in upgrade scenarios, if you have such jobs pending, they are executed as usual on Robots v2020.3 or older. Yes, upgrading your Robot to v2020.4 breaks the execution of preexisting pending jobs.

• Upgrading to Orchestrator v2020.4 requires Orchestrator v2018.2 or newer.

Known Issues

Upgrading

• During Orchestrator update, the installer cannot read an encrypted SecureAppSettings section within web.config . In order to read the EncryptionKey from Orchestrator's web.config and then migrate it into Identity Server's appsettings.Production.json, the key must be plain text. You need to manually decrypt the section before updating Orchestrator. After the Orchestrator update process was finalized, remember to re-encrypt the SecureAppSettings section in web.config.
• After updating your Orchestrator to v2020.4, the Profile page won't display login attempts previous to that update.
• If you had previously enabled Windows authentication while having set up automatic login for Windows AD users, then after upgrading your Orchestrator to v2020.4, you can't access Identity Server's External Providers page. If this is your case, open a new browser in incognito mode and type https://<OrchestratorURL>/identity/configuration. Read more details here.

Browsers

• Due to a browser persistent cookies issue, in very rare situations you might receive a Bad Request - Request Too Long error message when trying to access Orchestrator. If that happens, clear the cookies in your browser. For example, for Chrome browsers, follow these instructions to clear the cookies, making sure you select All time as time range. Internet Explorer or Firefox browsers also have detailed instructions on how to delete the cookies.
• When using Internet Explorer, Package Explorer does not display any workflows if the Actions feature is enabled at the host level. Instead, The requested XAML is not supported or contains error message is displayed. As a workaround, please use another supported browser.

Others

• In 2020.4 you can only create new tenants at host level. Creating them from the Login page is no longer an option.
• When working in modern folders, filtering the Jobs page by Machine does not function and displays zero results.
• Processes are not displayed in the Orchestrator Resources panel in Studio for Robots in classic folders. This occurs due to the Robot role not having sufficient permissions. Update the role with View permissions on Processes as a workaround.
• A new user's first login attempt into Orchestrator is logged as Invalid password in the Profile page if the user had to reset their password.
• Testing solution operations (e.g. create a test set, schedule a test execution, etc.) are not recorded in the Orchestrator audit logs.
• From now on, changes made on the Deployment tab at host level are only used by new tenants, they do not propagate to existing ones. In order to change them for existing tenants, you must make the changes explicitly per tenant.
• If you have invalid webhooks subscribers, you might notice some performance degradation in your environment. Make sure to remove any such subscribers such that you avoid performance deterioration. Click here for details on how to manage webhooks.
• The calls performed via PowerShell to the /api/account/authenticate endpoint fail for newly created users who change their password when they first log in to Orchestrator. Click here for details on how to manage such situations.
• If an identical package (i.e. name and version) is deployed to both a personal workspace and modern folder, once one is downloaded this same package is cached locally and used by UiPath Assistant regardless of the targeted feed (e.g.personal workspace or folder).

Insights

• After upgrading the Insights version, the browser cache must be cleared and the Insights page reloaded for the UI updates to take effect.
• Editing the Gantt chart widget of the Robots dashboard may cause both the Insights and Orchestrator pages to become unresponsive.
• If uninstalling Insights prior to proceeding with a fresh installation, the Sisense folders and services must be manually deleted prior to beginning the installation.
• The calendar heatmap widget does not function when viewed in Orchestrator, only in the Insights Portal.
• Exporting the Business ROI dashboard as an image occasionally fails. Exporting as PDF functions normally.
• The setting of a custom name for a process in Orchestrator is not reflected in Insights.

Bug Fixes

• A functioning Azure Key Vault credential store could be successfully edited with an invalid Client Secret which, following an Orchestrator restart, rendered the store unusable.
• Azure Key Vault secrets are now stored in encrypted form in the Orchestrator database.
• When using the Form Designer within the Create Form Task activity, images embedded in an HTML Element component using a base64 encoding were not displayed in the desktop version of Orchestrator. This occurred because string interpolation in the component did not work if leading and trailing spaces were not given between curly brackets.
• The text inside an action was not readable when using dark theme.
• The Non-working days restrictions drop-down used to be disabled when creating or editing a trigger with a timezone different than the timezone set at the tenant level (Settings page > General tab). Now you can select any calendars, but warnings are displayed about restrictions not being applied in different timezones, and an error appears if you try to save such a trigger. Consider changing the trigger's timezone or remove the selected calendar.
• The Environment field was not automatically populated when deploying a process, and only having one environment available.
• The See More buttons from the License page's Attended Concurrent and Studio Concurrent sections redirected you to the correct pages, but with misleading titles.
• The Automatically create an attended robot for this user option was enabled by default for the Admin user. From now on, if you want a robot automatically created, you must enable the option yourself first.
• A previous fix resulted in RobotName being required for RobotAssetValues calls, breaking existing API and Powershell integrations.
• The response body of a failed POST request to the /odata/Tasks/UiPath.Server.Configuration.OData.AssignTasks endpoint did not contain the user's email address. This only occurred for users without access-rights to the corresponding folder.
• The webhook payload for queue events did not contain information related to the queue SLA.
• Occasionally, having more than 20 standard robots on a single machine rendered the robots unable to connect to Orchestrator.
• Windows authentication failed for a user that was a member of two domains having a parent-child relationship, if the child domain DNS could not be resolved.
• An incorrect warning appeared when creating an asset of integer type with a value 0.