February 9, 2023 · Control Room

Feature update: Scheduler, custom SMTP server, RBAC

Greetings everyone!

In this feature update, we are bringing additional utility to work items, and improving other areas around operations, especially in Enterprise setups. In the upcoming releases, expect to see more utility added to work items, process operation, and APIs. We are also working on rehauling the look & feel (see our new Portal) and UX of the core views in the Control Room, so stay tuned for interesting updates during the spring and summer!

Scheduler - automatically run all new work items from the process input:

Control Room process Schedules and Triggers tab with weekday schedule and run-all-new-work-items checkbox

We have added a new option to run all work items in "New" state from the process input.
One powerful use-case for this option is to accumulate work to be processed by creating new work items using the API (or manually via Control Room UI) and defer the processing of said work items to a later time, on a schedule.
In case there are no new items in the input, no runs will be started, and hence no run minutes will be used.
Combined with a cron scheduler, the feature can be used to create e.g. queue pollers.
For further information, see the documentation.

Custom SMTP server configuration for notification e-mails:

By default, Control Room uses its own server to send outgoing e-mails, which may cause issues with some filters, e.g. in high-security Enterprise setups.
We have added an option (currently available for Enterprise customers) to configure a custom SMTP server, which will then be used instead of the default Robocorp e-mail service.
This will also enable sending of notification e-mails to non-workspace member addresses, which can be useful for e.g. integrating with e-mail-based systems.
In the future, we are also planning to include support for sending e-mails from the Robots via the custom SMTP server.
For further information, see the documentation.

Operator role UI update:

We have removed the ability for the workspace role "Operator" to see the "Robots" page in the UI.
The change was made to reflect the use case that "Operator" role is usually given to business persons to operate their automations, and the Robots page is usually obsolete for them.
No back-end permissions have been changed, so "Operator" still has access to robots for e.g. running Assistants.
With SSO RBAC, custom permission configurations are available for Enterprise customers.
The permission matrix has been updated to reflect the UI change.