2020 may have left us hanging, but as of 2021, UiPath’s biggest event of the year rebounded, ( and victoriously so, if we may add.)

This year, UiPath promises an even more spectacular event than ever before: Forward V, a tournament created by automation professionals for automation professionals and rallying up some of the best names in the field – and some of the most passionate attendees too. 

More than 3,000 people will be there to grow and network over the course of 2 and a half days of celebration, learning, and community gathering – all with the goal of pushing digital transformation forward.  

Because if there’s one thing the pandemic taught us is exactly this: digital transformation is long past its “buzzword” phase. It’s here. It’s happening. And it won’t stop soon. 

…Just like UiPath itself 🙂 

Between the 27th and the 29th of September, robotic process automation (RPA) will find a home at UiPath Forward V – this time, at the Venetian Las Vegas. 

Here’s a quick run through the event agenda: 

September 27th

The first day of UiPath Forward V will be dedicated to partners. Following the meet-up between UiPath leaders and partners, everyone will be invited to a Welcome Reception where groundbreaking experts in the automation field will network, discuss, and have fun. 

September 28th 

The real fun starts on September 28th, at 9 am. Grab your cup of coffee from the breakfast area and join UiPath forwarders for a day full of presentations on the most exciting and cutting-edge RPA topics of the moment. 

The day will be kick-started by none other than Mary Tetlow (Chief Brand Officer at UiPath) and Bobby Patrick (Chief Marketing Officer at UiPath), and followed by presentations given by specialists from UiPath, EY, Spotify, Deutsche Bank, Xerox, WESCO Distribution, Puma North America, Toyota, Amazon, Meta, and more! 

Are you in for an added bonus for the first day of UiPath Forward V? Join Marcus Buckingham, New York Times best-selling author for a discussion on how to bring joy into work. 

The day will end with a Venetian Masquerade to honor human achievement through innovation, technology, art, and music – a perfect way to end a perfect day! 

September 29th 

UiPath Forward V is far from done, as the second day of the event brings even more top-listed experts from around the world in discussions and presentations about automation, AI, and transformation. 

Presentations will be given by leaders at The California Department of Motor Vehicles, Dentsu, ManpowerGroup, Palo Alto Networks, Forrester Research, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, UiPath, and many others. 

The event will end with a farewell Happy Hour led by UiPath Co-CEOs, Daniel Dines and Rob Enslin. 

Why Should You Join UiPath Forward V in 2022? 

UiPath Forward V is one of the single most exciting automation events of the year, but you don’t have to take our word for granted on this. Here are five major reasons you should at least consider attending Forward V this year:

Top Leaders from Top Companies Will Be There 

Every year, UiPath Forward exceeds its attendees’ expectations by putting together rockstar line-ups: the kind of thought leaders and experts that are truly adept at what they do: automation.

If you want to hear from them and see how they think (as well as learn more about the grand ideas that keep them at the top of the industry), Forward V is the best way to do it. Nowhere else will you get a chance to listen to as much condensed expertise as you would at this event – that’s a promise UiPath has been making since their first Forward event in 2018, and which they have never failed to deliver on.

It’s Like A Mega-Masterclass on Fast-Forward 

Not only will you get to listen to people who have a depth of experience in the automation/ RPA field, but you will get a chance to interact with like-minded people and learn from everyone there.

UiPath Forward V is more than just an event like thousands of others: it’s a celebration of intelligence, human drive, expertise, and innovation driving. It’s the automation masterclass on fast-forward you (and probably everyone in your team) should take if you want to excel.

The best part of it all?

You don’t have to just sit down and take notes listening to an academic perspective on things. You can learn from people who are right there, in the trenches of automation every single day, and who have made a real difference in their organizations (and the world!) Now, that’s the kind of course you want to attend! 

It Will Help You Drive Innovation and Transformation 

Maybe you won’t go home and automatically pull it off or come up with the idea that will completely transform how your organization runs its business.

But the kind of information and learning you get at UiPath Forward V is mindset-shifting. Once infused with this kind of information, your entire view on RPA and automation will change, because it will have been fueled with the best, most qualitative, and most cutting-edge tactics and strategies from the best people in this industry.

Innovation doesn’t happen overnight – but access to the right kind of information and learning can definitely put it all on fast-forward. 

Two Words: Quality Networking 

We all know just how essential networking is in business.

If you want to connect with like-minded people who are genuinely interested in making the world a better, safer, and more efficient place through automation, Forward V is where it’s all at.

This is more than just a series of presentations: it’s an experience in itself – one that will connect you with people from all over the world, teach you more than any other masterclass, and help you build your career, advance your business, and achieve your goals. 

The Venetian Las Vegas Is an Experience in Itself 

OK, OK, as our special guest Marcus Buckingham will probably tell you as well, work shouldn’t be a joyless experience.

So for this year’s Forward V event, UiPath has made the single most exuberant, delectable, and rapturous location: Venetian Las Vegas.

What could possibly be better than a crowd of automation enthusiasts gathering in an exquisite place like this?

Conclusion

There are a thousand and one reasons to attend UiPath’s Forward V event in 2022 (or at least as many reasons as presenters there are.) But if we had to narrow it down to a single, over-arching motivation, it is this: Forward V is where the future of automation is happening.

The best experts, the most interesting talks, and all crowned by a location worthy of admiration: UiPath Forward V is bound to be an unforgettable adventure for pretty much anyone passionate about automation!

Aggranda will be there, and we’d be more than happy to meet and chat about automation. Come join us at UiPath Forward V and let’s help your business fast forward into the future – we’d be more than delighted to discuss this with you!

The 2021 Internship just ended last Friday, after 45 days of hard work and research from the participants. It was quite a journey, with plenty of growth opportunities – both for the interns and for us.

We’re glad to conclude that everyone involved had their share of Development, be it RPA or personal development. 🙂

Out of 100+ internship applicants, 7 made it with the final project by submitting a fully-functional, end-to-end automation they have designed and built on the UiPath Platform. Congratulations are in order to the below finalists, for their patience, dedication and, above all, willingness to learn (alphabetically ordered):

• Alin Daniel Nitu – Romania, with ”HRobot”, helping recruiters speed up their search of potential candidates on LikedIn. 
• Arthur Cristian Rotaru – Romania, with ”CryptoFollower” – an automated assistant, useful to any cryptocurrency investor or enthusiast. 
• Axel Nahuel De la Cruz – Argentina, with a bot that helps people automatically generate their daily COVID-19-pass certificates, necessary during lockdown.
• Gregory Okechukwu Offodum – Nigeria, with an automation suitable for the Accounting department, that classifies and extracts relevant information from native *.pdf receipts and invoices. 
• Lucian Cristea – Romania, by automating an often-encountered process in security systems: generating the per-employee random codes necessary to arm and disarm the unit. 
• Ravi Puvvula – United Kingdom, with a modular automation for the HR department, capable of searching and scraping potential candidate info from either LinkedIn or other platforms. 
• Valentin George Baltoi – Romania, with “Suitless” – a bot that automates the menial-manual admin work performed by interns and attorney assistants in law firms.

If you’re interested in our future Internship Programs, feel free to follow us on LinkedIn or stay tuned on our blog – more is yet to come with the best project submissions and feedback from the participants!

Time. To learn.

While the KAP workflow is a great tool, there is also a scenario in which a developer needs a more precise way of forcefully terminating applications and processes. Such a scenario occurs on high-density servers, with hosted virtual machines (VMs) in an environment that allows multiple concurrent users. Because there are multiple users, and because you cannot terminate a process for all users, the developer must single out the user whose processes they want to terminate. (Trying to terminate a process for all users will result in an “access denied/fatal error” message). 

In the image below you can see the above-described scenario. Multiple users are running the “chrome.exe” process. If you wanted to close “chrome.exe” the only way you could do that is by first specifying the username.

We know that developers frequently encounter the need to specify a user to close that user’s open processes in such an an environment, because the issue has sparked much debate on the UiPath Forum. Some have suggested using  custom *.bat files as a remedy, while others have suggested retrieving and killing processes by their PID. The Marketplace also offers some custom-made components that do just that, but as UiPath does not officially recommend them, their use may pose questionable security risks. Luckily there is a simple, short and easy-to-implement workaround for isolating a user and closing their processes.

The pseudocode is simple and should look something like this:

START
GET ALL CURRENTLY RUNNING PROCESSES
GET CURRENT USER
FOR EACH CURRENTLY RUNNING PROCESS:
GET PROCESS USER
IF PROCESS USER = CURRENT USER
TERMINATE PROCESS
ELSE SKIP
END

So:

• Start by adding a single input argument to the “KillAllProcesses” workflow, as an Array of String:

The Array entries contain all of the automation-specific processes you could want to terminate. You can define them manually in the array, but, then again, a good practice would be to specify them in the Config file for the end-user’s ease of use.

• Find and retrieve all the currently running processes and the current user, by adding two assign activities; (below renamed “Get all running processes” and “Get current user”). The CurrentProcesses variable should be an Array of Process (System.Diagnostics.Process), and the syntax to obtain it should simply be: Process.GetProcesses .

As for the CurrentUser, you can retrieve it by applying System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name (which will return the full hostname, user+domain included) and then removing the domain part, so the final syntax for that would be: 

System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name.Replace(System.Environment.UserDomainName+“\”,“”)

This will return a String containing the username only, for later use.

• Then, using a For Each loop, iterate through all currently running processes and retrieve the  corresponding user names for each open process. In order to do that, use the syntax Current_Process.StartInfo.Environment(“Username”) in an Assign activity, adding it to another String variable:

Please don’t forget to specify the TypeArgument of the loop as Systems.Diagnostics.Process, because we iterate through a collection of processes.

• As a final step, add an If Statement inside the For Each loop and check if the current iteration item (i.e. process) is an entry in the input Array of Process to kill and, if so, whether it’s run under the current user or not.

To verify the above you can use a single, but somewhat longer condition:

in_ProcessesToKill.Contains(Current_Process.ProcessName, StringComparer.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) AndAlso ProcessUsername.Equals(CurrentUser)

The actual Kill Process activity should only be executed if the condition is true, so it will obviously be added to the Then branch of the If Statement, with the CurrentProcess variable set as target process:

And voilà! Problem solved with virtually no risks taken!

We hope this comes in handy, and that it will be as much  help to you as has been  for us.