Building & Empowering Community || C# Corner

Hi everyone, what's up? My name is Stephen Simon. Welcome back to CShap Corner Live Show

In this episode of Ask Me Anything series, we have two very special guests joining us from Europe

We have Edward and Louisa. Hi guys, how are you? Hey, fine. Thank you for having us

Yeah, pleasure being in this episode. so Edward and Louisa you guys come from a UiPath background right why don't you go ahead starting

from Louisa and you both introduce yourself and then we will talk a lot more about what's going

to happen today well I joined UiPath one year and a half ago I'm a community manager so my role is

really centered around people so I basically empower people I my job is to take the robot

out of the human so people can actually enjoy their workplace. I joined because I was really

curious about the technology and because you are a Romanian startup, it started in Romania, it was

the first Romanian unicorn. I was really really excited to meet the team and see the legends that

brought this to life. The hype is still there from my side. I'll surely come back to what you said

is like a startup unicorn company from Romania. That is something really interesting. And we

have seen in the past how fast and rapidly UI path has grown globally. We'll surely come back to

later on. Edward, your time, who you are, what you do, and where you're joining us from

Yeah. So you just said I'm Edward. So I'll probably repeat it. My name is Edward Slipetsky

I'm in this automation business since 2014. And as we disclose a little bit in this intro

I am actually in automation business since 19 years old. And maybe I was thinking of how I can contribute to today's session

And my thinking here from community side is all the knowledge I have from the very first robot I made up to becoming MVP for UiPath

Everything was happening thanks for community because all my education was happening in, you know, like open community learnings in forums, et cetera

and I'd like to read the message here that like you can do a lot just

with patient and there is no things which should limit you like okay not

having education or something about your background like how rich or poor family

you were born at etc so I'm in this business since 2014 so

since being 19 not this year I'm UIPAV MVP in the meantime I also run my own

company already for the third year which is focusing on intelligent automation. And we are serving

mainly Europe, but had also some smaller projects in Singapore and around the global world. So that's it

shortly. That's great. I mean, I think being at UiPath MVP would be really great

And Luis, I would add to it on how to become a UiPath MVP. What are the benefits

that we have in the entire community that UiPath provides? She's going to

cover it as we proceed. And in the very beginning, we have said this RPA and

the UI path we have mentioned a couple of times even in the first three to four minutes right

So Edward why don't you go ahead and talk about what is RPA actually I mean it's been a while in

the market for now I think for the last three to four years it has gained a lot of you know attention

but still relatively it is very new to the market. So what is the first thing that that one one should

think when they hear about the term RPA? Yeah maybe I would start with the thing what you should

not think when you have the term of RTA because it is robotic process automation. And before

I even didn't like the name probably at the very beginning because you always imagine some machines

are doing something, you know, and the robotic process automation is something, what I imagine

that brings you coffee on Saturday, like piece of metal, which can do some mechanical activities

But actually, robotic process automation is about automating software-based processes, So digital processes

And here, what it can do is it can do exactly the same things as you can program because it's still based on like different platforms are based on different programming language

For example, UiPath, there is VB used quite often in a regular studio

So you can use APIs. You can use the application integrations. You can connect to databases, et cetera, as with any other programming language

But what you get on the top, what is, for example, when you don't have a possibility to use API or there is no API at all, et cetera, the huge difference and advantage what RPA brings is the integration with UI, with user interface

So whenever you don't have API, whenever you don't have a connection to database, you can still go directly through UI and you can see how a robot actually clicks different objects, et cetera

The only difference is that it is happening much, much faster than human beings would do

And I have a sample, which I would probably broaden the screen, where robot is processing items

It is reading items from Excel and putting it to SAP, but doing it times faster than human beings would do it

So let me know whenever my content is visible, and we will proceed with that

Yeah, I think I have your screen. Yeah, so the main thing I want to pay your attention to is that how fast the data are populated

and the only waiting you will see on the screen, here we have four screens being processed in parallel

and you only see bleaking, and some of the pop-ups are not enough to appear

because it's interacting on a really high speed with the user interface

You can actually, in this manner, you can automate any digital process

Nor do you have API, nor do you have a connection to database or not. It is still possible to automate

So probably this is the main difference, how it deviates to all the other types of programming

And one last thing, what is even on the top of it, You have image recognition, you have OCR, and now also there is a computer vision edit

which is enabling you to also recognize objects directly on the pictures

nor it is like scanned PDFs, or if you try to automate something inside the Citrix environment

So I think that it is all the basic things which you have with the regular programming

plus things on the top, which enables your application to act as a human being

That's great. That's great. Well said. And when you talk about the UI interaction, you say there's a robot that will be running and will be interacting with the UI

That goes a lot with the, I think, the company name that is UiPath. One thing to note here is people would often go and say that, hey, AI would take jobs, robots would take jobs

But indeed, we have Luisa joining who works at UiPath. So I think of this one, how do you see

how do you both of you see that as we advance in technology and AI machine learning what taking places on what humans used to do And the example just you showed in the SAP ideally there would be humans who would be employed to go and do that task

but you were able to do that all things simultaneously using the QI path

automation tool using Studio. So how do you both see these jobs and these robots taking place when it comes

to employment? Any one of you can go ahead and answer. Thank you

So for me, it's a collaboration between the human and the bot, which actually the human

the person has the ability to build his or her own bot

So he takes all the tasks that are repetitive, are boring, are redundant from his or her

job, automates that, and just do other things, interact more with colleagues, bring out projects

that really value the qualities of people. My job is 90% interacting with people and being very human oriented

It has some repetitive tasks, automating as well because we do have also a robot ready

person approach now and we are trying to bring the technology closer to everyone just to

make it friendly for everyone to understand that everyone can actually have their own

and there's nothing to worry there. It's just like it helps you. It's not there to steal your

entire job, it's just going to help you with some parts of your job. It might be a small part from

a daily task, it might be a bigger part from a weekly task, but it's there to help you and

support you to do your tasks better. That's well said and I think taking from what you say is

is a robot for every person, right? Edwin, you can go ahead and add

then we can actually come out what are the prerequisites if anyone wants to move into RPA, right

Yeah, maybe one more thing about this robots replacing people, because I think that this is quite a hot topic

especially in the very beginning, whenever you start any RPA project, you need to overcome it in the organization

with setting the right people awareness, et cetera. But I would compare it, I think it's quite often used simple, maybe boring one, but whenever there were cars introduced after the horses, I think that it still killed some positions, if we would say

It still occupied some of the, like back in the past, there were probably more people taking care of horses

But nowadays, I think that in return, it generated much more positions in car manufacturing, etc

So I would not say that it is going to take positions. I would definitely say that it would change the way of working, the way how we used to work

And for example, as of now, regardless of the size of the company, people should not, you know, you should not have a people employed just for daily full time copy pasting of activities

But you would have a robot whenever you go for lunch or having coffee. You would press the button and you would have this work done

But remaining time you would allocate to some more advanced activities. So I would say that it is not to replace, but it is more to kind of shift and change the way how we used to work

And I think that this is already happening. We are not speaking about some far future

That's great. That's great. So coming back, coming back to one of the one of the topics that people would like to know when Luisa says that a robot for every person and every person can actually have a robot for their own

And as you say, that you're going for lunch, you can have a bot doing a job for you

And you're just trying to remove that repetitive task, both from a day-to-day life and from the enterprise perspective

What are the prerequisites for any of the person coming? It may be he or she, maybe a newbie, a new graduate or someone who has five to six years of development experience

What are the technology experience and the programming language one should have if he or she wants to move into the field of RBA

I'm really happy you asked that question because over the years like ever with 2015 when we opened

the sports free trial and started building for the community we have actually created an ecosystem

because we do want to welcome everyone we even have 14 year old kids to start automating from

from school and people who reskill or upskill their careers so there are 40 or 50 or old people

who want to learn a new technology so they can. We have a platform which is called Connect

It's our new system. And basically over there you can find the academy

which is a couple of courses, a lot of courses on different types of level

And they are free to enroll and to go for everyone. So if you want to start your new RPA

you just need to type uipathacademy.com and there you have it. you can start with the awareness

like basic to get into basics, and then move into more difficult things like this

And then we have the forum, which is actually this global virtual community that

is there to help you with any type of question you might have

Product managers from UIBot who are present there and are looking for interaction with people

We have marketplace where once you go to the academy and start learning, you can go create your own components

with projects, and you can put them out there. And of course, a part of these, we also

have virtual events where you can try and learn or interact with other people

And we also have people like Edward, amazing MVPs, who are there to offer this incredible support to everyone

both in terms of content and also in responding on every platform, I think on LinkedIn, on the forum

everywhere, they actually reply and will help everyone who wants to

And I'm going to let Edward talk about the skills, the programming skills that mix and match that. Yeah

Thank you. Thank you, Louisa. I wanted to show the hard time why we were speaking

but I didn't want to interrupt you to don't bother. I think talking of me as MVP and all the other great MVPs we have

I think that this is minimal payback we can give in return to everything

what we have in these great times. So talking of programming skills

I must say that considering now the wide range of products, and especially with UI path, we will be later on

so I know that we have a topic to speak about, different types of students, et cetera. I'm careful to say that you don't need the programming skills to build a robot

And why I pay attention to this to build a robot is because there is a huge difference between building some robot at home or building it for some minor tasks, etc

Or building the center of excellence where those robots are able to run unattended, run in the right sequence, etc

So for building robots you don need to have any programming skills And there is so Studio X If you just Google it you can get it also free And you can just with simple drag and drop functionalities there are different app integrations So you can you have a help to read from Excel

and you can have a long list of items to be processed and one by one, robot would go and do it, et cetera

So you have a lot of things already pre-built, but you know, like whenever you are starting in programming

you appreciate a lot of these pre-built things. You appreciate all these drag and drop functionalities, et cetera

Whenever you grow and you become more and more senior, the more you start not hating it, but the more you say, OK, this is this is so I want to do my own

You know, so for for the guys who said that I want to do my own work, probably I am now one of one of those

But even if there is sometimes I want to do my own because it's my own. But the point is that for those who like to experience more advanced things, etc., there is a Studio and Studio Pro even where you can invoke code, when you can work with APIs, etc., when you can build the custom forms

And so it is from the very, very beginner where you don't need to know anything

Somewhere in the middle, I would point maybe people who worked with Excel and macros because it is not programming, but you are getting there kind of

And then, of course, object-oriented languages. And you can have also a lot of fun there because the platform is quite wide

That's great. I mean, one thing when you mentioned is about the drag and drop

So UiPant does have an approach that says low code or no code approach, right

Where it saves your time. I mean, if I'm a developer and if there's an activity, there's a for loop activity, right

Instead of just going and typing the entire for loop code, I can just search from the activity tab and just put it on my canvas

In the same way, there are many, many activities. And just the way Luisa said, we have a marketplace where people from the community can actually upload their custom activities

and inside the studio, you can actually go and download it. I shout out to Manoj, who is one of our own MVP from UiPath

I really like to use his activity that is called Firebase Activity

which is so easy. You just need to drag and drop, add some credentials, and there you go

From UiPath, you can connect to any Firebase database. So it's all about the community

It's about built around the community. And I did mention about the forum, if I'm not wrong

what I have observed that if you post any question in forum it is answered within seven minutes I

know that I think it might have decreased the time maybe like four or five minutes maybe but

the people in this community are really really active both it may be a UiPath community or it

may be in the entire RP ecosystem it may be community in the entire developer system it may

be a C-sharp corner I think one thing that really empowers to a product-based company or this entire

ecosystem is the support of the community that we get and so is Luisa and Edward doing us today

so moving on to that Edward what what should we actually look to automate I mean if someone is

not working in an enterprise or a company right so in a day-to-day basis in an enterprise company

there are many business processes they look to automate right but at the same time when you run

your own company what's the different type of clients that you get and the

different processes right you automate and deliver to the clients yeah so talking

of processes which are to be considered for automation first of all it is

manually repetitive yes so you are not going for something like one-time

automation but sometimes even this I must highlight that quite often you do

automation even for one time, for example, when you have the system migration or something like

that, it is one-time activity. You don't do a system migration hopefully every month or something

like that because it's very effort. It requires a lot of effort, but at the same time, it requires

a lot of actions inside and repetitive actions. So you can do it also with one-time activities

but rarely, and there are specific cases. Often, it should be highly repetitive. It should be a

rule-based and evaluation of the rule-based is, I used to say that you should be, the person who

executes the process should be able to draw on the paper the way that I, using this paper, would be

able to execute it. So there is no some rocket science steps where people would say, okay, this

I know just because of my, like, some previous experience or the wind speed or some other things

which it is hard to actually know for now. So if it is logical and well-structured, this is another

thing. Then digital inputs, it's quite important. So if you have it handwritten, etc., now we are

getting there. And I think the technologies are evolving. And in even months, not years, I must

say that I think that it is getting better and better. But still, it's highly appreciated if you

receive the data in some structured digital format so you can capture the text 100%. You don't need

to use OCR or some other technologies. So digital input, and that's it

And another one is maturity of the process, because if all the things you apply to the

process and say, okay, it is highly repetitive, it is rule-based, et cetera, one important

thing is the process maturity, because if you start automating like two months after

the process was created, there is a high likelihood that this process is to be changed

And with the change of process, you need to change the code again and again

So process maturity here means that your process is being executed the same way already for quite some time

That's great. And when you talk about different processes, I think, Louisa, we do have many courses in UiPath Academy, right

And recently, UiPath announced their advanced certification, right? I said there was a certification that was primarily free for a long time

People could go and do it. Right. So why don't you go ahead and talk a little about different type of certifications and especially the advanced RP certifications that we have, which is again free

OK, it was free till 31st March. Oh, I think I missed it

Right. I did miss it. So it was free for a really long time

And now they have another certification. Right. Why don't you go and talk about that

I was thinking actually to share the screen to get into the page for you to see

Yeah. Let's see. Right. Do you want more time? You need more time

You can go ahead and talk with Ed until then. No, I think I'm, can you see my screen

Not yet. Okay. Let's. yeah yeah yeah i think yeah i think you'd have to move to the other screen right here in the

you're on the yeah right now you won't be able to see yourself now yep okay so i just wanted because

the academy has gone through some um new look has got the new look uh and it's much more fresh

it much more easier for everyone to to learn and to to go through the uh the courses so you You don really have to follow a 30 40 50 minute course You just get like these little pills of knowledge the way I call them And they are grouped and housed

For example, your first time on the academy, this is how you start. Everything is here

Everything that you need to know, including some tests, exercises, and so on. Then, you know

it's a little bit more into product and then the latest three pieces. And here you can see it's

quite a big catalog of courses. I would definitely encourage everyone to just look and see what is

their interest. So if you already know some stuff about RPA where you're a very good developer

the starter is going to be a no-brainer for you. I mean, it's not a couple of minutes and you'll

you'll be done with that. But there are a lot of resources that everyone can access

regardless of their professional background. And, yep, I would definitely advise for everyone

just to go there and scroll through those. There are too many to just sit now and group

Maybe, I don't know, Edward, if you want to do some recommendations

specific recommendations for the T-Shark community that you think would be of interest for them

to go directly to that point? Yeah, definitely. I mean, there is now a wide range of products at UiPath

and there is a lot starting from, I don't know, process mining and task capturing

and ending somewhere like Automation Hub, which I think we will get later

what is for managing of the automation. It is more for center of excellence managers, et cetera

But for C Sharp community, it is definitely a studio. So go and check the training switcher

like RK developer training, where you get overview of how to use the studio

And it is nothing like you don't need to spend months on it, but you can get an understanding really in a few hours

This is the first thing. And I was thinking, I mean, we are to present it to C Sharp community

And I was thinking those guys already know how to code many things, et cetera. And like, what may be the usage of it for C Sharp community

And I think that quite often when hearing C-sharp or .NET, we are speaking about desktop applications, which are still here and there to be tested, right

And I think that with this tool, especially now with introducing the pro version of the studio also, it is so smooth and easy to build a quick robot which would execute for you the test, etc

So you don't need to really bother a lot with coding and also especially if you need to test also user interface, like how all the button clicks, etc. work

So I think that this is the usage for C-sharpening, like how you can immediately start using it even without switching the profile or becoming the RPA developer, etc., but just still being at your job position but utilizing it

This is one thing. And another I wanted to add to what you, Steve, mentioned is about the certification

So I think that there are two types. One is the diplomas and another is the certification

so and I would compare one is the knowledge and another is the proof of knowledge

so and this proof of knowledge you need to use somewhere nor for employment

or if you're a service provider you may show it to your customer etc

but even what we said it started to be like not for free

but paid one even this you don't necessarily need it and for your home purposes as well

as your professional programming purposes if you're doing something for community etc

You have full version of UiPath, not limited anyhow for free. This is one thing

And you have all the trainings and all the resources for free also available

So if you pay this extra, I don't know, hundreds of dollars or euros

you don't get extra knowledge or something. You get certification. You get the proof that you went through some tests, et cetera

But everything that is needed to become the good developer in RPA, you have for free

You have an academy. You have accessible. And it is still community open, I must say

And also, it's a community edition. So basically, everyone who starts learning on the academy, which, again, learning it for free, only the certification

Ignite the diploma of completion. We have the community edition. So basically, you get to test and build the bot, which is free for individuals, even for companies that have a specific flow of profit institutions, NGOs, education institutions, and so on

So that is free and will remain free. Like Edward mentioned, it's a certificate in which maybe maybe some places for employment companies and so on

But the entire knowledge, practice, everything, it's for free for everyone. Yeah, that's great

I mean, it's entirely free. Most of things come at CUI Path for free, the forum, the community, the activity

The studio is entirely free. And we also get bots attended and attended bot to post on the orchestrator

Edward Wilcove, orchestrator. And when it comes to certifications, the different job profiles that RPA has brought

like RPA developer, we also have solution architect course, we also have courses for HR

so people coming from entire ecosystem, any of the company, they can just move into RPA and get

started. Edward, why don't you go ahead, we have been talking about the studio for a while and

also for the robots, why don't you go ahead and talk about the cloud features that UiPath provide

which is actually the orchestrator, where you can actually run your bots in the clouds and work

remotely and also from the smartphones you can manage all your bots. Why don't you go ahead and

talk a little more about that? Yeah sure, happy to bring that on. So, at the very beginning I was

speaking that there are three main components which we assumed about like UI path from the

very beginning which was studio where you build the robot, the robot itself meaning that where

the actions are executed and this virtual robot which is going and clicking everything on the

screen, and the third one, when you manage it. And remember when I say that there is a huge difference

between building the robot and building the scalable center of excellence. So what you brought

with the cloud features is actually the scalable center of excellence. So if you are to build

and I have the funny sample I did for the Facebook or for the Christmas, if you need to greet your

friends and to send it in many different languages or something like that, you can still use the robot

to predefine the messages for you and then you just add your final story from the air or something

like that. To build this simple robots, you don't need any cloud orchestration, etc. But when there

are the processes, and we have some with our clients, when there are the processes with short

SLAs or which are to be executed during night, day, 24-7, etc., then Orchestrator comes into a game

And this is a platform for managing several things, starting with credentials

So it covers somehow the security also. You can store credentials for your applications there, then for different robots, etc

For scheduling, meaning that you can manage the schedule of each and every robot, when to start, in what sequence

to execute, etc. Queues, and this is very important, again, whenever you imagine that

there is a process which is to be executed more than 24 hours a day, meaning that workload

is much higher, then 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 robots come into a game. And orchestrator ensures

that if you work on 100 items, that robot 1 and robot 2 will not pick the first item

to work on, but they split the work in between themselves, meaning that robot 1 will take

the process one, robot two, the process two, et cetera, et cetera

And they would continue without conflict in with each other. So this is queue management

And yeah, last but not least, there is an easy deployment, meaning that once you have the code ready, the robot ready

and you want to spread it along the many different virtual machines

or users if it is a tended type, and we can later speak about those types

You can spread the solution easily and fast using this Cloud Orchestrator because you just publish the package there and it automatically appears in all the environments

You just download it and you are able to use it immediately. But again, to highlight, these features are more aimed for large-scale implementations and this so-called center of excellence

Yeah, and I think one feature that I would personally use is that whenever I would log

into the orchestrator, there's a very nicely built dashboard that I would get

I would see number of bots that are running. What are the processes that's being run

What are the scheduled jobs? So there are things that one should really love

And you don't have to do anything. You don't have to worry your own personal cloud. It may be an Azure AWS

Cloud does everything for you. And it comes even with the community version

You can go ahead and get a feel of the Architec Center. And we have one amazing course of Architec Center also in the UiPath Academy

Coming back to Luisa, I heard UiPath and the RPA for the first time in January 2019

And one of my very close friends before, he introduced many people to us in this community

And a lot of people came to UAPath meetups, right? And that has been very cool

Even at C Sharp Corner, we had local chapter meetups, right? We also do webinars

So, somewhere this meetup has played very vital role. Why don't you go and talk about different meetups that we have

What do we cover? And how should one be able to join that

I would like to say we cover everything. Definitely. So because we changed, everything is now virtual

It's a bit different from when you attended the meetups physically. So we used to have meetups locally in cities, countries, all around the world, in the US

in Europe, India, APAC, and so on. And they were very localized, local language, local interest

Like, for example, if someone was interested only in the business yst side, we would go into that

Of course, the core focus is developers. But we wanted to make sure that everyone is up to date and is welcoming the community

Now, since everything is virtual, we sort of lead to regional and global events that tackle subjects of the place

important such as like the testing um the testes and everything related to testing which is now i

think at the fifth virtual meetup on 25th of june so that's already a new micro community of people

that are interested uh in that and besides that we also have the local virtual meetups uh that are

very specialized on what people actually want to learn to know more and the way they want to

We definitely try to keep the networking part, the interaction part, the feedback, providing feedback, interacting with the product managers or the presenters and so on

It's been a bit difficult. You know, in person, it's definitely more engaging

But we are happy to see that the interest in RPA or virtual apps has grown

I think there's lots of people who are looking nowadays and understanding more, indicating

more information. So yes, virtual meetups now, virtual are one of the main channels for us to be in touch

with the community, to keep offering what they need from us and keep improving basics

of the product. that's how we manage we get the feedback from the people and we bring it better

i think yeah i think meetups were something really really interesting you go and get to meet people

you come on weekends and you write you work from monday to friday even then you come on weekends

and it's not just about sharing knowledge you connect with people from different organizations

working in the same city and on the same product you share ideas we get to meet people from the

products team from the ui path they will talk a lot more about the future updates and and there's

a lot more we all have very good memories with their meetups there's one question i think edward

if you would see is that uh maybe we can frame it a little well that is coming from uh uh he says

how long this rpa will help to get job in the market i think uh rpa is anyway into the market

and it has provided a lot of job opportunities to people but still when it comes from a developer

it does tell is that you want to understand what a different type of job roles that RPA provides

right? So maybe you can talk about the different, you know, the job title or the position that RPA

provides generally, not just with the UI part, generally. You are an entrepreneur, right? You

run a startup for RPA, so even that is one of it. Yeah, so you can run the startup and run a

competition for us or maybe you know a partner you can run a live show too right yeah you can run a

live show start the podcast but actually um first of all depends where you are coming from and

still depending where you're coming from you don't necessarily need to change to be like to become an

rpa i don't know expert or something like that because many people and especially we've seen

it now with this Reboot Your Skills program, they are still being within the same organization

when you are currently, and even if you are a good candidate to dive into RPA business

for two main criteria or options. One is if you are a developer and you would like to create those robots, or the other

if you are doing repetitive stuff. So even if you are on the other side of the game, this is a great opportunity to have a

on Studio X, to have a look on this Reboot Your Skills program, and just to start automating first

your work and then helping colleagues. So this is what it comes when we speak about building robots

But there are other things which are not directly related with code and programming and building

but still supporting actively the RPA movement And the first main and quite big role is business yst So this doesn require any programming skills but it requires ytical skills where always before automating any process

there should be someone who first captures it and understands it well. And here, from RPA

perspective, we look at the process from a completely different angle. Because for a human

being, imagine you're doing something in Excel, and there are three pop-ups in a row saying

we have to update your system, something else, and something else. As a human being, you know

quite often, I've seen also those simple, we just click OK. And even if you're being onboarded in

some companies by some SME, they say, OK, never mind, just click OK, move on, you know

Yeah, this type of things, this type of things for a robot can be a bottleneck, because we need

to know exactly what to do with this for that type of pop-ups, etc. And when we are starting

to describe the process. We are realizing, even with SMEs, how deeper we start to understand

challenge this process from different angles, etc. So business yst is another role

when you are able to, without having anything to do with building robots, you can be the one

who would bridge SME, the person who executes the task, and developer

Because quite often, developers prefer to focus more on this development area, and there is still

maybe even communication sometimes that you need to bridge this two together. So there is a business

yst who can prepare a great documentation which developer is to follow as

well as clarify all the test data, etc. And then depending on how

your center of excellence grows, you will definitely have center of excellence champion, so

someone who would manage this all. Sooner or later, you would build more robots

and there will be someone who would steer this robot so you can become a manager

but not for people, but you can manage robots and you can see how they're performing

You can scream at some of them or say good words in some way

It's like, come on, speed up, you know, but schedule them, et cetera. So monitor

And then even the next level, there might be a change management

Yes. So sooner or later, your organization will be affected by this, definitely positively

but still affected the way that you need to adapt. So revision the way you execute the processes, revision the way how you do this or that type of work

And there, change management comes in place where you need a change manager who would help to set it up and document properly

So this is just one of you. We have also Architect. And with this, all the new features which UI Path is bringing, we as MVPs, we are concerned taking some vocations or something like that

Because if you are for one week out of business, you have no clue what are all these new products and you can always keep up

So there is a process mining. There are a lot of new functionalities, which you can also explore and add on to RPA itself

That's very well answered, Edward. And I think that there will be the RPA has grown very, very aggressively in the past two or three years

And there's a lot of job roles available. And there are many more companies coming to the market

and there's a lot of new ecosystem that is being built. Coming back to Louisa

I have one more interesting thing to talk is about the hackathons that we have

Sherry, I'll tell you, I, Manoj, Sheetal, and one of our partner

we won one of the hackathons that happened in India. Manoj and the other team members

went on to another hackathons. We would get prize money. I have a couple of Alexa and Amazon vouchers

So those 24 hours when you stay there and talk to the product teams

that there are people to guide you, you really create custom activities

and even upload those to the marketplace. And even the guys from the product team would help to get it published

within that time during the hackathon. So that's a lot of things to learn

Maybe people would like to know on how this is being organized and how now they can participate in this virtual hackathon during this pandemic time

Yeah, well, lovely to hear from your experience. Definitely, I would have liked to hear more of how you felt. We used to have them in person and I drove some of them in Beacarty's Romania and I absolutely love the energy around it

You know, everything that was developed is definitely one of the best experiences I've had is working at the iBot

Now we did move virtually. We did have a global virtual hackathon on custom activities

It was a little bit different because it was not just a hackathon, but it was a learning journey somehow

So definitely we are innovating in the way we make happen. So it's not just 12, 24, 48 hours, and that's it

For us, it's more about making sure that we engage the, not the right people

but the people who have the skills or the people who want to learn the skills

and are very, very passionate about building the certain component. and certain communities to ensure that we

the winners, the ones that are really gonna bring the innovation, gonna make everyone wonder

and making sure that we have those for the entire community available there to use

to make and continue building themselves. So we don't have the drone going right now, virtual mobile

but stay tuned. You never know when we're going to, even though it's not going to be maybe not

the challenge, some sort of direction, again, a collaboration. Again, as we move forward

try collaboration more than just giving the challenge, receiving the input. It's not a business, it's a collaboration between us

It has always been from the beginning to the community and we want to be like that

It can be a bit of course, having them more involved as they go

Yeah, I think hackathons are something that is really exciting. You get to meet many people those 24 hours

It's not 24 hours. Sometimes it goes like 30, 36 hours because, you know, you're excited

You just don't leave the hall after hackathon ends. You want to go out and hang out with all the people who are there for past 24 hours

We have one question from you, Edward, coming from B3Mula once again. We did answer it

But once again, he says that his daughter experienced people switching to RPA advisable

Could you please even explain why? I think... Not a problem. Yeah

Yeah, of course. I mean maybe a little bit about the specifics of RPA It is something that is driven by business or at least on the very beginning it started to be driven by business So automation let be honest

it was there ages before also. I mean that 20 years ago

there was still possibility to interact. Some SAP modules are 20 years old nowadays

and features of automating it were always there. But IT, who was responsible for bringing those innovations

probably had just different focus. I don't know the reasons why it was not happening earlier

but I think the wave of RPA, which is still I think growing, is partially and with a big part

created with business. So business is driving it, business is driving this now engagement of more

people, etc. And RPA, I would say that this is more also about people, about the collaboration

For example, even if you are the best RPA developer in the world, you can't automate a process without SME, without subject matter experts, someone who would explain it to you, show it, walk you step by step, et cetera

So as I explained back previously, there are different types of studio

We have the ones which you don't need programming, et cetera, but you have also Studio Pro where you can invoke the .NET code, C Sharp, Python code, and you can build your objects, reasonable components, et cetera

what RPA gives you as an opportunity is besides the coding which I think

you experience in many other areas as well be more engaged with the people

meaning be more engaged with the teams and also for me what is the great

opportunity as a developer I saw already plenty of processes in order to cash, in supply chain

in finance etc and I mean all of us are sometimes wondering like how all this

big corporations works like. So being just a developer, I saw how ordering is working in some

company, how security works in the banking, how some other things are happening. And just because

someone needed to explain it to me for me to automate it. So talking of .NET experience

people switching to RPA, definitely understand also what role you would consider there and why

why you are switching. Because what is your main motivation? If you want to collaborate more with people

and not all of these people are developers, so you have different types, et cetera, definitely, yes

And you will then have a lot of collaboration, a lot of also funny discussions, et cetera

So this is one of the big differences, I would say, classic programming, Nord.net or Java

et cetera, towards RPA. I think that there are much more people and much more

engagements from different levels. So shortly answering questions, definitely worth considering. And then depending on understanding of the priorities

Yeah, and I think when Vithrumula says that if you have a .NET background

when we talk specifically with the UI path, it's built on VB.NET

and there's now also support with C Sharp. So definitely if you have a .NET experience

moving into RP is not going to be any tough for you. But as Edward says, you have to look on what type of role you are looking for, because you come from a .NET experience background

You don't want to go and get started with a .NET developer, right? You are at a senior level now

So maybe you want to be, maybe think and understand on maybe, maybe be a part of the team initially and understand how the processes are being automated

And then eventually you can go ahead and move into RPA. We are already 48 months for life

We have last 10 minutes and I think I never actually spelled it as like first 10 minutes or something

OK, so we will. One question to Edward is like these days we have heard about the automation, right

But people are now also talking about hyper automation. You go to any of the RPA company website, people have now started talking about hyper automation

So what is this hype within hyper automation? We were just somehow absorbing all these automation, new services, and that was coming

And now it is again hyper-automation. So why don't you go ahead and talk a little more about it

So hyped automation, hyper-automation. So talking of hyper-automation, and we just had an episode published yesterday about this

partially covering an operating model. The main thing is that at the very beginning you were focused on automating exact process

So you build a robot, then you build a robotic center of excellence. The second stage when you have more robots still dealing with your repetitive tasks and rule-based

clearly defined, digital and well-structured input, etc. So this is the first level

And then with hyper automation around already existing robots or while building, you wider the scope

When I say wider the scope, I mean you are adding new technologies and new technologies to make robots smarter on one hand, so more advanced

And we all speak about AI, machine learning, deep learning, et cetera, OCR, NLP, and adding integrations to this extent of more advanced robots where you don't need any more

just to feed the perfect field Excel form, and it would be processed by a robot

But you can also drop the different templates of order form or something like that

which a robot never seen before. And just by using intelligent data capturing, it can recognize

okay, this is the invoice number, this is address, this is items that customers are ordering, et cetera

So I think that on technology level, on one side, getting more advanced with widening the robot capabilities

with all these features I described. And on the other hand, there is also a human factor

which is making the preparation for RPA also easier with the process mining, with the task capture

meaning that people have less effort and less pain to prepare and automate later this process

with the easy click-through tools. And then it builds end-to-end platform, which is called hyper-automation, when you can do all this wide range of activities on the one hand

And on the other hand, there is a way of executing. So when we are speaking about different types of robots, back in the past, we were speaking only about attended or unattended

meaning that you could choose if you will be interacting with the robot on the screen or it will be executed on the background

Now we have this new concept of human in the loop where actually robots, whenever they face the task which needs to be solved by people, they just send a notification to your phone or in orchestrator and they move on

They don't wait for this response. They move on and process other tasks

and if you check it regularly, like every hour or every, I don't know, four hours or something like that

with your phone, you can solve those tasks and a robot would realize that

okay, you solve it and then pick it up and move on. So now we have this kind of also hybrid mode when robots and humans are collaborating closer

and it is not necessarily attended when a robot is waiting for you to immediately respond and not doing anything

That a very well answer So I think adding the capabilities of more powerful technology and AI and all that would surely build a scene for this hyper automation Surely not in hype I seen people did talk about that hey RPA is just in hype but we have seen that it does solve problems of a day to day and at the enterprise

Of course, I think hyper automation is something people would like to know in the coming time

I think we are now almost, let's try to wrap things up

So, right. One last question that I would ask Edward, then I'll come back to Luisa once again

Right. It's Edward, you have used that you have been into this RPE from last of like five, six years, starting from 2014

Right. You as a developer and when you work on this automation, what are the challenges

What are the challenges that you face during a development of a pod that you would like to move into the field of this RPA

I think from the very beginning, moving into a new field, regardless if it's RPA, C-sharp or riding horses, it is hard at the very beginning

And there is this climbing the first peak. I think it's always quite hard

So I would say that like the very first advice, just build your first robot

Think before what it should do. Like whatever. It can be a Facebook robot

It can be a robot dealing with your some daily tasks or whatever. Like think about it up front and try to achieve build your first robot

And when you hit the first complications, remember what Luisa was saying about the forum and short respond time

Because if you drop it, first of all, probably someone already had this problem and you can just find the answer there

If not, you just drop the question and you will get the response really fast

And so maybe as for starters, I would definitely recommend to be part of community, not just to build, you know, like not the aim is not just to automate the processes, but you as an MVP and also before getting to this point, I feel as a part of a family, you know

So my message to whoever would start with RPA, be a part of this family, you know, and then everything is much more easier

You have plenty of reusable components. We have things which you guys build on hackathons, etc

We have a lot of things already available. So I'd say that be a part of the family

It's just quite a very generic thing. And then in different aspects, you would face different

issues, you know, in coding and also with dealing with people, you know, like clarifying the

processes, etc. But I think that it is worth another one-hour session explaining all of this

but if I am to give one advice to people I would say that be a part of family, be a part of community

it pays back a lot. That's well said. Adding just more to it, I would come back to

Lusa, is that we have talked about different programs that our big community provides to

connect but the time has changed and everything is getting virtual. What should be the call to

action to the people who are watching and who will be watching this later on if they want to connect

with the community? I mean, we at C-Sharp Corner do have plenty of resources. There is a category of

RPA separately where you will find RPA not just with UiPath perspective, but from

documentation articles, quotes from the entire ecosystem. But coming from you, Louisa

what should be the call to action after someone watches it to go and connect with the RPA community

I would just say go make an account on Connect UiPath because there you have

We have the forum to the academy, to people that can actually message directly if you

see something that's interesting, you can message them. And also, the latest platform that we launched, which is specifically for the community events

the meetup, and you can actually find all the meetups that we have, whether they are

or join that and make sure that you participate because I think the meetups are the greatest

way to get all the information in one hour and in the end you get the possibility to ask

whatever is on your mind. Everyone will answer. You know, if the speaker does not answer

someone in the chat will answer. And just like Edward mentioned, whatever question you

you might have the forum is the number one place to go

I am on the forum, so questions like, how can I put this on

or I can answer that. I'll also put my iPod there. So go to connect, make an account

browse through everything, and just feel free to approach us on LinkedIn

on Slack, community, on iPod, on connect, everywhere. And if I tell you where you are

in the journey, and we'll say, okay, here, participate at this meetup, which is exactly

what you'll need to know. And, or, okay, I'm going to put you in contact

with someone who definitely knows how to help. Yeah, and I think

Edward, you would surely like to mention the podcast that you've run, but I have

shared the links in the comments. Maybe a couple of moments, you can just talk about that, and this is the wrap

Yeah, definitely. Thank you very much. So talking on the podcast, as an MVP, I decided to create an initiative

when I would gather the knowledge from another, because we are 20 for this year

from another 19 MVPs when we are covering different topics, starting with some more business-related, like operating model

or people awareness and later going deeper into development standards, et cetera

So automationimpact.io is the website, and there will be more and more new episodes coming

This is one thing. And one thing I just wanted to add to what Lucia

Luis, apologies, Luis has said, is the thing of where to start

the call to action, I would say just start. So just do the first steps

And then we have so great community that it would move you through

And just start. It's like, don't overthink. Don't be concerned if you have the right skills, et cetera

Just try it. all right great so i think uh before we just wrap let me let me talk about the next amy that we have

coming is on saturday it's automated machine learning flow code with amy cage the cloud of

radvocate it will be on 9 30 a.m eastern pacific time zone so i'll see you there next time having

said that edward and louisa we had a great time with you i stephen simon on behalf of an entire

c shop corner and its millions of users would like to thank for your valuable time and the

contribution that you have made to the community. It was an honor to have you both and would love to

have you back whenever you guys are available next time. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure

and hopefully we'll meet everyone on our community, global community. Yeah, all right

Yeah, thank you very much and thank you very much. Yeah, feel free to connect also. You have our

contacts and the LinkedIn profiles etc. So we are open for discussion and to help you to do

these first steps. Thank you. Great. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much