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IntelliBuddies Control Room - FAQs

What is IntelliBuddies Control Room?​

IntelliBuddies Control Room is a web application that enables you to manage, monitor, schedule, and control your automation processes and resources. It is a central place that acts as a connectivity junction to integrate your automation with humans and other third-party software.

Is Control Room a web-based application?​

Yes. Control Room is a Web Application and can be accessed through a Web Browser.

What are the supported browsers?​

Refer to supported browsers page for details.

Why do the two passwords reveal eye icon appears on the Microsoft Edge browser? How to hide it?​

The Edge browser has two 'show password' icons when accessing the IntelliBuddies Control Room. The first icon is related to Edge's 'Reveal Password' function. Second, this icon is from the IntelliBuddies Control Room login page.

Password reveal icons appear in the Microsoft Edge browser if you enable the 'Show the 'Reveal password' button in password fields' option in the 'settings/password/advanced settings.'

Turn off the "Show the "Reveal password" button in password fields" option in the Microsoft Edge settings to hide the password reveal icon.

Here is an example showing how to enable/disable the password icon in Microsoft Edge

What is the use of the Control Room?​

Following are the uses of the Control Room web portal software in the automation process:

  1. To Orchestrate the automation designed and executed by the IntelliBuddies® platform.
  2. To Manage, Monitor, and control the automation process execution.
  3. To administer various entities (such as Users, Roles, and Licenses) by setting appropriate permissions.
  4. Design user-friendly Forms by building communication channels between humans and buddies.
  5. To create and manage automation triggers that enable you to execute your automation based on specific criteria.

What functions does Control Room provide?​

Control Room functions are broadly classified into the following categories:

Automation Administration​

Automation Management​

Automation Monitoring​

  • Jobs - Monitor your automation executions

Automation Resources​

Who can manage Control Room?​

The Control Room user with the Administrator role, a superuser, has full access permissions to manage all the entities inside Control Room.

What are the different permission levels to manage in Control Room?​

The basic permissions are view, edit, create and delete. Refer here to know more details.

Are Buddy and Robot mean the same?​

Yes, Buddy and Robot both mean the same from the perspective of IntelliBuddies. IntelliBuddies uses the word Buddy for Software Robot. Most people call Robot a Bot in an abbreviated form.

What work can Buddy do?​

Buddy is the execution host that runs the Processes built using IntelliBuddies Process Designer. The Smart Buddy performs end-to-end automation without human assistance, and an Assistant Buddy performs specific repeated tasks on your day-to-day activities.

Why are buddies named Smart and Assistant? How is Assistant Buddy different from Smart Buddy?​

The name Smart and Assistant are because of the scope they are bound to execute the processes.

Smart Buddy executes end-to-end automation without human assistance. Hence, Smart Buddy must be attached to a Smart Station to perform automation. It is available only as part of IntelliBuddies Enterprise Edition.

Assistant Buddy acts as your virtual Assistant and can help you perform specific repeated tasks in your day-to-day activities. An Assistant Buddy deployed on a machine can be used by the associated user only from that machine.

How to assign, manage and monitor Buddies?​

Users having specific access can assign Buddies to perform certain functions. Smart and Assistant are types of buddies associated with your organization that can be managed and monitored through Control Room > Buddies > Smart and Control Room > Buddies > Assistant.

Smart buddies typically run under a virtual user's context. However, an Assistant buddy gets bound to a specific user and a machine. Virtual users are special user accounts dedicated to specific applications or Smart Stations.

What is Smart Station? How to provision Smart Station?​

A Smart Station represents a workstation (such as Windows Server, PC, or Laptop), physical or virtual, on which you deploy Smart Buddy. It authorizes the connection between the Smart Buddy and the Control Room.

Create a new station on the Control Room > Smart Station page, provide the workstation name, and copy the Key generated. Go to the workstation, start the Start Station Agent, and specify the above Key to connect Smart Station with Control Room. For more details, refer to Provisioning Smart Station.

What are Smart Station Service, Agent, and User? What are their uses?​

Smart Station Service is a Windows Service deployed on Smart Station (Windows Server, PC, Laptop). It manages and provides periodic status updates across Smart Buddies and Control Room.

Smart Station Agent acts as a client application of Smart Station Service. You can connect or disconnect from the respective Control Room using Smart Station Agent.

Smart Station User is a workstation Windows login user. The Smart Buddy is associated with this user (such as a domain user or a local computer user) session to run automation. This is the user credential that Smart Buddy uses to login into Smart Station and execute the assigned job.

Note: The Smart Station User login password is used by Smart Buddy only if the associated user session is unavailable. The Smart Buddy uses the existing session if the associated user session is already available.

Is there a way to execute the process at a particular time every day?​

You can use Time Trigger to trigger Smart Buddy to execute a process at specified intervals or schedules. For more details on how to create time triggers, refer to Creating a Trigger.

What are jobs? How do you create jobs?​

A job is an execution instance of a process by a Buddy. Refer to Job Creation

Is there a way to execute multiple processes at a time? How many processes can be executed by a Buddy at a time?​

Yes, you can execute multiple processes at a time. If you have many Buddies, more processes could be executed in parallel. A single Buddy at a time can execute five(5) jobs, same or different processes, at a time.

note

If the jobs or processes share common resources, the process designer has to take care of conflict resolution inside the process definition.

Is there any limit for adding several buddies in a Control Room?​

There is no physical limit defined for adding Buddies in a Control Room. However, a single Control Room instance with provided system configuration can smoothly perform up to a minimum of 100 Buddies.

Is there any limit for publishing several processes to Control Room?​

There is no physical limit defined for publishing processes in a Control Room. However, a single Control Room instance with provided system configuration can smoothly perform up to a minimum of 1000 processes.

Is there any limit for adding several users to the Control Room?​

There is no physical limit defined for adding users.

Where can we obtain information about licenses assigned to users, and how many more licenses are available for the assignment?​

You can view, add and append IntelliBuddies client tool licenses from the Control Room > Licenses page. This page displays the available, used, expired, and total number of licenses per client tool.

What are roles? What roles are available?​

The role is a collection of Permissions. It represents the Permissions needed to access certain Control Room entities. By default, Administrator (Full access), Designer (Design and publish Process into Control Room), and Member (execute process) roles are available.

For more information, please refer: Roles

Can we have custom roles defined?​

Yes, the user with the administrator role can create custom roles and provide access to the Control Room entities accordingly. Please refer: Creating Custom Roles

What are Enterprise Variables?​

Enterprise Variables are variables stored inside Control Room so that they can be shared across Processes and Buddies. There are many types of Enterprise Variables, from simple Text to a complex Credential types. They allow you to store specific information so that the Buddies can easily access it. For more details, refer: Enterprise Variables

What are Forms?​

Forms are a visual representation of data and information. Forms can be used as a communication channel between Buddies and Humans in tandem as part of more extensive process automation. For more details, refer: Forms

How to create and access Enterprise variables?​

You can create Enterprise Variables either through Control Room or Process Designer. However, you can modify or delete an existing Enterprise Variable only through Control Room.

You can access Enterprise Variables inside your process either using Activities or Predicates.

Is it secure to store credential information in Enterprise variables?​

If you want to store confidential information inside Enterprise Variables, please encrypt it before storing it. Both Control Room and Process Designer provide an option to encrypt the Enterprise Variable while creating. It gives one level of security, as it holds all credentials with the Triple-DES algorithm encryption. They can be invoked or accessed by RPA developers when designing a process but will hide their values.

What are triggers?​

Triggers enable you to execute your automation based on specific criteria, such as an email arriving or a particular file created or invoking a process at a specified schedule (such as daily or weekly). Please refer to Triggers for more details.

What is a schedule?​

A schedule is a trigger criterion that causes a process to execute at specific intervals. You can configure how often the process has to run in terms of hours, minutes, months, daily, particular dates, weekly, monthly, and recurring.