Microsoft 365 Unattended Won’t Lower Licensing Costs

• Microsoft 365 Unattended licenses Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise for use with unattended robotic process automation (RPA) .
• The offering solves potential license noncompliance problems and some technical barriers.
• Challenges remain that make unattended RPA a choice of last resort.

Microsoft 365 Unattended is a special license type for Enterprise (E3) and Education (A3) customers that permits an automated process (also known as a bot), instead of a person, to control Office apps in scenarios in which operations can be achieved only through the Office UI, not programmatically. This process, called robotic process automation (RPA), can be used to automate repetitive tasks such as document processing with Power Automate or other automation engines. However, the Office suite does not include any technical improvements to better support RPA use and adopting bots to replace human control will not lessen licensing requirements.

Architecting RPA Procedures

RPA procedures, also known as UI automation, are a series of programming instructions that drive an application through a series of UI actions—simulated keyboard and mouse entry—that mimic actions that a human user would have performed. The technique is mostly useful to control applications that do not offer an API to achieve similar results, or whose API lacks certain required functions, and can be an important stopgap to continue using legacy software in line-of-business automation. For example, RPA could be used to transfer data from a human resources (HR) time and vacation reporting site into an older payroll system that does not offer an API or other data ingestion methods. Typically, the RPA procedure is recorded and played back through Power Automate or third-party RPA technology.