Input Automate PLESK with this free RPA Extension

[RPA]

Server operating system version

Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS

Plesk version and microupdate number

Plesk Obsidian Version 18.0.46 Update #1

Hello Pleskians,
I am building an extension for Plesk Obsidian that allows hosting providers to host RPA environments and bots for their customers and to create bots that handle certain events in Plesk.
This plugin will help you to streamline your operations and adds a new revenue source for everyone who is not offering RPA hosting to its customers right now.
As you might know, existing RPA market leaders charge hundreds if not thousands of euro's to their customers in monthly licensing fees. And with this plugin you can take away a little bit of this market share.
Therefor I'm looking for input on what features you all think should be included in the official v1.0-1 release.

Current BETA feature list:
- RPA Hosting (internal/reseller/customer)
- Attach bots to Plesk events (i.e. run bot when a new customer is created)
- Add internal bots to quick access menu
- Access to personal bots from plesk interface (customers and domain users)
- Gather usage statistics (traffic, diskspace, runtime)
- CRON tasks for bots
- API for bots
- Webforms for bots (embed the form on any website)
- Library with pre-build bots that you can configure for your usecase (free and paid)

full disclosure: hosting of customer environments will be a paid feature, and the free version is limited in the amount of internal bots to use.
I am waiting (for quite some time now) to hear back from Plesk about my partner account, and as soon as they do, I will publish the extension.

 

[Kaspar]

That's interesting. For those of us (including myself) that are not familiar with RPA hosting could you give an example of a use case in which this would be useful with/on Plesk environment?

 

[RPA]

That's interesting. For those of us (including myself) that are not familiar with RPA hosting could you give an example of a use case in which this would be useful with/on Plesk environment?

Some background information about Robotic Process Automation (RPA):
You could see RPA as an evolution of automated software testing, where developers program the steps a user would take in the software to search for errors.
An RPA bot mimics user behavior (mouse movements, keyboard inputs, reading information from the screen, saving files etc.) but also has access to API's and can leverage AI features.

Now imagine one of your clients, they offer SEO services.
Their sales process might include generating reports with an online SEO analysis tool, but unfortunately they do not have an API, and everything is done in the browser.
This is where the client decides to build a very simple bot that browses to the analysis tool, enters the URL and make a partial screenshot from the results page to paste into their quote, and then sends it over through e-mail.
They will need either a server or a spare laptop to run this bot on, and because it needs to be available 24/7, they are looking to host it on a VPS.

Remember why people choose shared hosting:
- No server maintenance
- Consolidation (lots of small websites on one server is cheaper than having one server per domain).
- Ease of Installation

All these reasons also apply to RPA Hosting.
And of course it is great to combine RPA with e-mail, databases, and web forms with RPA so that the customer will have a end-to-end environment, and does not have to buy licenses from providers like UIPath, Automation Anywhere, Kofax or BluePrism. Saving them hundreds of euro's per year.