Kapow 10.1

Hi,

Considering upgrading from 9.7 to 10.1 - what's great about the release in your opinion?  A list of pros and cons would be really handy.

Thanks.

Con: We recently moved from 9.6 to 10.1.01.  Soon after we switched MC 9.6 off and began running our robots on MC 10.1 we noticed a significant spike in errors.  Most were due to Continue When step configurations not behaving as they had in 9.6.  When we logged a support case, we were informed that is was a known issue and would be fixed on 10.2 which will be released late 2017.
Due to this, we switched back to 9.6 and will wait until 10.2 is out before we try to see if the issues are fixed.


Pro: Device Automation and Password Store.  Despite the issues we have has with our 9.6 and earlier robots, Kapow 10 Device Automation has worked quite well.  Prior to 10, we had several Business Processes that we could not automate due to limitations with Kapow and the process we wished to automate.  Kapow 10 has allowed us to use the new Device Automation process to tackle and complete 
Another feature that I like is the Password Store.  In Management Console Repository, there is a new Tab for Password Store (along with Robots, Types, Snippets, etc.).  Password Store is designed to grant access to different systems without disclosing sensitive information. This tab shows available and assigned Password Store entries. You can create new and edit existing entries. You can grant access to Design Studio and Management Console robots by creating new Password Access entries. 
Every time you upload your robot or any of its components, such as types, snippets, and so on to the Management Console, a new Password Access entry must be created for the robot. Previous entries are kept in the Password Access list and the administrator can delete them manually.  This is helpful since the passwords are not contained in the Robot, but accessed from the Password Store.  

Other features in 10:
▪ Built-in optical character recognition (OCR) to extract text from images
▪ Image finders to find and extract images
▪ Lock Screen You can lock computer screens when working with Automation Devices if this is required by the security policy in your company.

Excellent - thanks very much for this, really useful info.  Re: OCR - extracting text from images; does this make extracting text from PDF's easier?

Prior to 10.1, Kapow did not have any built-in OCR.  Kapow was not able to convert a scanned image of a pdf  or from an image file into text.  If a pdf was not scanned image, Kapow was able to loop, extract, etc. similar to looping and extracting a web page (although, since pdf's do not have html tags, it is not as easy as extracting from a web page).  
Prior to 10, in order to extract text from a scanned pdf or image file, the robot had to "hand off" the scanned pdf or image file to an outside process which would complete the OCR extraction to pass back to the robot.  
Kapow 10.1 includes built-in OCR.  The documentation suggests that this will allow Kapow to extract text from scanned-in pdf's and from image files.