This is a guest post by Charlotte Kummer, VP of Sales and Marketing, at Automai.

To grow and service their students and faculty with innovative and responsive solutions, higher education institutions today must keep up with change. As technology in education marches forward at a faster and faster pace with mobile devices, virtual labs, and more and more new applications, the only way to successfully embrace change is to continuously test and monitor processes and automate repetitive tasks.

It is a challenge today for most higher education entities to run reliable, low-maintenance test automation, monitoring, and RPA due to interconnected applications (including legacy apps), complicated protocols, lack of open APIs, and different access points such as web portals and VDI. While technologies like Citrix’s open possibilities for higher education with access from anywhere, collaborative digital workspaces and securing of research data, automation of these processes becomes increasingly more difficult.

Automai addresses challenges to accessible testing and automation by focusing on how the end user interacts with applications. Automai’s core is a visual technology that works with computers just as humans do — viewing a screen from the front end and responding with keystrokes and mouse movements.

We created this technology out of necessity as a testing solution that could emulate hundreds to thousands of users, concurrently accessing a system and performing a set of actions, without dealing with wraparounds or plugins.

The idea was simple: visually assess a screen and act accordingly. The technology to make it happen is complex. It has to “see” and use images and text instead of code as triggers, be intelligent enough to adapt, and at the same time, maintain a small footprint. To be effective, the solution also has to be code-free so anyone with business knowledge of the application could build a scenario.

In line with human activity, the Automai bots running the actions can handle unexpected events, report back actionable results (screenshots of errors relating to a specific action), and perform logical if/then, and loop instructions to handle any scenario.

Automai applies this front-end technology to offer a platform that services automation needs for BizDevOps in higher education.

Automai’s Robotic Automation Platform

Automai provides one platform that manages bots for:

  • RPA: Automate repetitive tasks, eliminate errors, free up human resources for other work.
  • Performance Testing: Ensure your application can handle the expected number of users at the expected level of performance
  • Functional Testing: Know that every test case will work.
  • Application Monitoring: Be alerted of performance issues before users are affected. See performance trends to better manage back-end resources and optimize performance.

Our codeless, front-end robotic technology enables anyone to test, automate, and monitor:

  • Any business process
  • Any application
  • Any technology
  • Any access points

Automai enables higher education institutions to do more with less, saving on implementation and training costs with one platform that has one script hub, one bot controller, and one automation studio for all departments.

Streamlined automation is also a huge time saver in terms of maintaining scripts. The various departments do not have to be educated on every change in order to keep their scripts updated. Because the scripts are shared, the changes to them take effect universally. For example, when an application is upgraded and causes a process to change, the dev team can edit the script from testing by replacing an image that was part of the upgrade. The monitoring robots and the RPA robots automatically pick up this change. Ops and business teams can focus on other tasks.

Automai’s Citrix Ready verification makes it a valuable asset that many entities using Citrix have discovered. Automai recognizes the importance of Citrix to move higher education forward in providing seamless experiences for students, faculty, and staff and has established best practices for automation and testing Citrix-run applications.

For more info on Automai’s Robotic Automation Platform, contact info@automai.com.