Assistant Manager, Robotic Process Automation at Deloitte
Real User
Feb 2, 2023
There should be a comprehensive or enterprise level of application to provide the cognitive AI, and there should be orchestration so that I can control all the robots on one station. The other tools are currently providing these features. So, hyper-automation integration should be done, and it should have cognitive AI. One drawback of WinAutomation is that it doesn't work properly on the Internet Explorer or Edge browser. On the older version of Internet Explorer or Edge, it sometimes doesn't give proper selectors while selecting the fields. I had a lot of difficulty in that area, and I want them to improve that in WinAutomation. They should have a comprehensive platform to help the community. They should have blogs. They had a community before, but they discontinued that. Microsoft has developed a community for any support required for its product. WinAutomation should also have that.
What needs improvement in WinAutomation by Softomotive is its stability. Stability is quite important to me. Another area for improvement in the solution is robot scheduling because it's not 100% accurate, in particular, it's 90% accurate. The monitoring of the robot could also be improved because it's not very straightforward, and you have to look in a few places or at least two places which means that monitoring is not a one-glance process.
Chief Executive Officer at Rabbit and Tortoise Technology Solutions
Real User
Feb 11, 2021
It should work better for Angular websites, as it has a lot of problems. It is not able to read the data from them as expected. In general, it should work better with modern websites. Scalability needs to be improved so that it can support multiple bots. There used to be a Process Watch feature, but it is now gone and should be put back.
WinAutomation is missing a lot of options that are available in UiPath. One limitation is that for logs, the only option is a CSV file. There is no option, for example, to work with an Excel file. There is a limitation in setting up loops, where it does not support multiple conditions. We would like to be able to write code, the way you can inside of UiPath.
It would be helpful to have features that are fine-tuned for Microsoft products because most of our clients are using products like SharePoint and OneDrive. The OCR functionality needs to be improved. We are not getting the same accuracy as other tools when reading things like PDFs.
One of the challenges is dealing with OCR text recognition. They link out to Google, IBM, and Microsoft AI services for text recognition. This area needs to continue to improve because recognizing forms and what's on a form, and then when you try to translate that into information that you can use, is very difficult. I have not been able to make that work. I think that the technology is there, but it would require too much coding and it would be too much of an investment of time to make it work. WinAutomation doesn't have the management abilities for remote management, but we are using Splashtop to access the device that is running the software. In the next release, I would like to see form recognition added. AI form recognition for processing things like invoices and timesheets would be number one.
RPA Developer at a tech consulting company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Feb 16, 2020
I think the primary thing that needs improvement in this product is the stability. It looks like it is easy-to-use and that is very nice, but it is more important to have a stable product and not just one that is easy-to-use. If I am working to create a simple process, odd errors occur quite often and in the middle of creating the process. The additional features I might like to see in the next release would be adding in some capabilities that other products already have. For example, some RPA process management framework. UiPath has something like that, RE Framework (Robotic Enterprise Framework), which is something in Softomotive we have to develop by ourselves. They have some premade processes in WinAutomation, but in running a process they should have some kind of error handling. For example, if there are tasks that should be run like 100 times and maybe it will freeze up at the 50th cycle, then the process should start again from 50, not from number one. If they can come up with some kind of framework and error handling, that will enhance the stability of the running processes made out of their solution. Right now I cannot resolve these main issues on my own and they should be added to the product.
At this time, I can't say the solution is lacking any features. The solution could use some more advanced AI tools. It's one of the solution's only weaknesses.
The solution could offer more specific training. There should be more examples of what the functions can do and more instructions and explanations to the process.
Technical Lead & Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Nov 13, 2019
The solution's recommendation feature needs improvement. So many times it fails, which tells us that although the hardware configuration and software configuration and the environment stay the same, we should expect the automation tool to recognize images correctly, but it does not. There have been issues in which it has failed, and it remains a concern. At times, it crashes, for some unknown reason. We avoid automating any complex automation processes. We find the solution to be not that user-friendly, and might be using the older version, which really did not have a lot of features, so my review is mostly based on the older version. WinAutomation could work on a simpler process of providing a development of something that proactively tells us what is wrong in the code, because what is happening right now is that we make the scripting code in some other place and some other control, and we identify errors over there. We simply copy it to this control, which is not even providing any color-coding, or any other assistance to the developers. Copying it from elsewhere is necessary to pick up any errors with ease.
Microsoft Power Automate is a powerful tool that streamlines and automates tasks within an organization.
It is used for workflow automation, data integration, and creating automated notifications and approvals.
Power Automate connects different applications and services, such as SharePoint, Excel, and Outlook, to automate data transfer and synchronization.
There should be a comprehensive or enterprise level of application to provide the cognitive AI, and there should be orchestration so that I can control all the robots on one station. The other tools are currently providing these features. So, hyper-automation integration should be done, and it should have cognitive AI. One drawback of WinAutomation is that it doesn't work properly on the Internet Explorer or Edge browser. On the older version of Internet Explorer or Edge, it sometimes doesn't give proper selectors while selecting the fields. I had a lot of difficulty in that area, and I want them to improve that in WinAutomation. They should have a comprehensive platform to help the community. They should have blogs. They had a community before, but they discontinued that. Microsoft has developed a community for any support required for its product. WinAutomation should also have that.
They've already improved it, but I guess a testing suite would be nice to be able to test your automations in real time.
What needs improvement in WinAutomation by Softomotive is its stability. Stability is quite important to me. Another area for improvement in the solution is robot scheduling because it's not 100% accurate, in particular, it's 90% accurate. The monitoring of the robot could also be improved because it's not very straightforward, and you have to look in a few places or at least two places which means that monitoring is not a one-glance process.
WinAutomation's OCR integrator should be improved.
It should work better for Angular websites, as it has a lot of problems. It is not able to read the data from them as expected. In general, it should work better with modern websites. Scalability needs to be improved so that it can support multiple bots. There used to be a Process Watch feature, but it is now gone and should be put back.
WinAutomation is missing a lot of options that are available in UiPath. One limitation is that for logs, the only option is a CSV file. There is no option, for example, to work with an Excel file. There is a limitation in setting up loops, where it does not support multiple conditions. We would like to be able to write code, the way you can inside of UiPath.
It would be helpful to have features that are fine-tuned for Microsoft products because most of our clients are using products like SharePoint and OneDrive. The OCR functionality needs to be improved. We are not getting the same accuracy as other tools when reading things like PDFs.
One of the challenges is dealing with OCR text recognition. They link out to Google, IBM, and Microsoft AI services for text recognition. This area needs to continue to improve because recognizing forms and what's on a form, and then when you try to translate that into information that you can use, is very difficult. I have not been able to make that work. I think that the technology is there, but it would require too much coding and it would be too much of an investment of time to make it work. WinAutomation doesn't have the management abilities for remote management, but we are using Splashtop to access the device that is running the software. In the next release, I would like to see form recognition added. AI form recognition for processing things like invoices and timesheets would be number one.
I think the primary thing that needs improvement in this product is the stability. It looks like it is easy-to-use and that is very nice, but it is more important to have a stable product and not just one that is easy-to-use. If I am working to create a simple process, odd errors occur quite often and in the middle of creating the process. The additional features I might like to see in the next release would be adding in some capabilities that other products already have. For example, some RPA process management framework. UiPath has something like that, RE Framework (Robotic Enterprise Framework), which is something in Softomotive we have to develop by ourselves. They have some premade processes in WinAutomation, but in running a process they should have some kind of error handling. For example, if there are tasks that should be run like 100 times and maybe it will freeze up at the 50th cycle, then the process should start again from 50, not from number one. If they can come up with some kind of framework and error handling, that will enhance the stability of the running processes made out of their solution. Right now I cannot resolve these main issues on my own and they should be added to the product.
At this time, I can't say the solution is lacking any features. The solution could use some more advanced AI tools. It's one of the solution's only weaknesses.
The solution could offer more specific training. There should be more examples of what the functions can do and more instructions and explanations to the process.
The solution's recommendation feature needs improvement. So many times it fails, which tells us that although the hardware configuration and software configuration and the environment stay the same, we should expect the automation tool to recognize images correctly, but it does not. There have been issues in which it has failed, and it remains a concern. At times, it crashes, for some unknown reason. We avoid automating any complex automation processes. We find the solution to be not that user-friendly, and might be using the older version, which really did not have a lot of features, so my review is mostly based on the older version. WinAutomation could work on a simpler process of providing a development of something that proactively tells us what is wrong in the code, because what is happening right now is that we make the scripting code in some other place and some other control, and we identify errors over there. We simply copy it to this control, which is not even providing any color-coding, or any other assistance to the developers. Copying it from elsewhere is necessary to pick up any errors with ease.