In its simplest form, the Blue Prism software is made up of three components:

• The Application Server that runs the Blue Prism services. It serves as the brain of the entire setup, performing functions such as connecting to the backend databases, scheduling, and storing logs.
• The Runtime Resource, which are more commonly known as the robots. They can be either physical or virtual computers.
• The Interactive Client installed on your desktop that allows humans to interact with the robots by developing processes, scheduling tasks, or monitoring the robot logs.

The three components pass information to each other on a constant basis in order to make the entire system work as shown in following diagram:

In this book, we will assume that the application server, runtime resources, and the interactive clients have been configured correctly by a system administrator...

Once you have successfully installed the Blue Prism interactive client, you can launch it in any of the following ways:

• From the Start Menu, click Start | Blue Prism.
• Alternatively, you may choose Run | Blue Prism

The Blue Prism application is represented by a blue triangle. Double-click on the icon to open it.

A sign-in screen appears. Follow these steps to sign in:

1. Choose the connection that your Blue Prism administrator has configured for you.
2. If you see a User Name and Password field, enter your Blue Prism credentials. This is an account that has been issued to you by your Blue Prism administrator. It is not your Windows username and password.
3. When done, click the Sign In button.

As developers, we will be spending most of our time with Studio. This is the place where we work with processes/objects.

Let's dive right in and create our first process:

1. Click on the Studio button. The screen shows a tree on the left-hand side. The tree contains two leaf nodes at the top: Processes and Objects.
2. Right-click on Processes and choose Create Process.
3. The New Process dialog appears. Give the new process a name. Call it My First Process. Click Next.

4. Enter an optional description for the process. It's always a good idea to write a bit about what we are going to build so that others will know what the process is doing. For now, just provide a token description, for example: This is my first Blue Prism process. When you are ready, click Finish.
5. The process shows up in the tree on the left, inside a folder named Default.

Look...

Most RPA programs today are code-free (or at least low code), and Blue Prism is no different. It provides a Visio-like canvas to sequence each step in the process. You design a flowchart that contains a sequence of steps. You can choose from a suite of ready-made actions what each step is supposed to do (for example, click a link or press a button). Finally, the steps are linked together with a definite start and endpoint.

Let's take a quick tour of what it's comprised of:

• Top menu has all the commands and tasks that we will need to create our processes.
• Toolbar gives us quick access to commonly used commands and tasks.
• Toolbox contains the ready-to-use actions that you can drag and drop onto the canvas.
• Canvas is where we will draw the process flow diagram. Also notice that the first and only page that we have opened is...

Blue Prism has a portal that contains a wealth of knowledge about the product. Visit the site https://portal.blueprism.com. If you do not already have an account, simply click the Sign Up here link to get one.

The site is chock full of useful articles to solve almost every Blue Prism puzzle. There is also a community where you can post questions and get expert help from both the online community and the Blue Prism team. It is also the place to download the latest Blue Prism release and any VBO library files or add-ons. Throughout the book, we will reference material that is available on the website. So do sign up for an account if you have not already done so.

We covered the basics of building processes using Blue Prism. In this chapter, we rolled up our sleeves and created our very first process, complete with pages. We also took it for a test run to see the robot in action.

In the next chapter, we will flesh out the process and replace the stubs with the tasks that we actually want to execute.