4 ms·
How is legacy compatibility a moat? Any RPA engine, certainly Microsoft's is going to cover the same stack. That's one of the consequences of RPA - when you i
by mgummelt 5y ago
How is legacy compatibility a moat? Any RPA engine, certainly Microsoft's is going to cover the same stack. That's one of the consequences of RPA - when you integrate at the UI layer, you get compatibility for free.
- m1sta_ 5y agoMost of them look for window events. I've not seen an RPA tool that actually reads the screen like a human, even though that's how you're thinking about it.
- ethbr0 5y agoThe bit players simply map Active Accessibility / whatever MS calls it now (Windows Automation Framework?). The more serious players shadow Windows events. The real stuff does process injection and directly shadow copies / modifies in-memory data structures.
- mgummelt 5y agoThat's not how I'm thinking about it.
- ethbr0 5y ago"Integrate at the UI layer" is a can of worms. In simple cases, it's clicking a button. In real practice, it's triggering some esoteric sub-event the developer hooked, or returning coherent data tables from whatever not-table thing a developer cobbled together. Example from current work (US government system, Oracle Forms / Java based): a scrollable "grid", actually composed of individual, carefully-lined up text boxes, containing 12 rows, which moves / updates the contents of each box as the user scrolls.