Automation Anywhere Review

Automation Anywhere is a very comprehensive, all-in-one automation utility. It has an easy-to-use interface, large number of actions and a great help file that guides you through most of the operations available.

To start off, let's speak about the Automation Anywhere workflow. To start creating a task, you have two main options: to record it or to manually create it yourself. Both of these have advantages and disadvantages. Recording your tasks is simple and easy. However, you don't get to customize your actions list (of course, after recording, you can edit the task list). Also, recording your task can sometimes be slow (till you find the icon you were looking for, or the button to press, etc.), but Automation Anywhere gives you an option of speeding up the pace at which it replays your actions through the recorded task. You can therefore reduce the time it takes to reproduce the set of actions that you performed. However, if you fell that you require even more control over the task that you are creating, or when recording is not viable you can always manually edit or even create a task from scratch. This is a somewhat lengthier and a bit more complicated, but Automation Anywhere tries to guide you throughout the whole process by giving easy hints at every stage and for every action and by having a very comprehensive and easy-to use help file. In fact, a help button is always visible, at whichever point you are, and that help sign gives you quick access to all the info needed to successfully accomplish that part of the task.

The variable manager is a very accessible one, and you can use variables throughout most of what you're doing, and insert them most anywhere. Variables are great for keeping track of what you application is doing, for setting conditionals, creating loops, or writing data to files.

Automation Anywhere, however, has a severe problem when it comes to windows. If you're going to want to perform an action on a certain window, then you're going to have to keep it open, so that you can select it from a drop-down list. Now this is great for precision, and if you're only going to be operating on a single computer, but if you don't have an application installed, and you're going to want to create a small program for another computer, know which window you want to work in (but can't have it open on the machine where Automation Anywhere is installed) - then tough luck. This lack of flexibility hampers a certain number of operations (but increases precision for the remainder of window-based operations).

The user interface is easy-to-use and navigate through, the actions are well sorted, but that's what you generally expect from an automation application. The novelty of Automation Anywhere is the sheer number of actions that it places at your disposal. At times, however, the user may feel a bit stranded - there is no unique 'if' conditional, there are a bunch of other 'if + some other command', but no unique 'if' conditional. This can be of course worked around by using the included actions, but gives an example that improvements can still be made to the application.