Typical Licensing Scenarios for Unattended RPA

Each robotic process automation (RPA) scenario could require a different set of licenses to stay in compliance, with more licenses needed as more steps of a process are automated.

This illustration shows four ways to architect a line-of-business process that receives résumé submissions and sends each one to a hiring team. Each step of the process that is automated is shown in gray; these steps increase the process’s licensing footprint in exchange for saving some user processing time. Additionally, recent guidance from Microsoft indicates that each user who benefits from an automated action (such as receiving a generated e-mail) must be licensed for the automation tool.

Manually: As each résumé comes in, a user retrieves it, opens Outlook manually, and sends it to the full hiring team. This scenario requires the user to hold a regular Microsoft 365 license to use Outlook.

Programmatically, non-RPA: When a résumé arrives, a user clicks a button that runs an app that uses the Graph API to create e-mail and send the résumé to the full hiring team. This scenario requires the user to hold a regular Microsoft 365 license and possibly a license for the app that does the processing.