What's New in Automate

What's New in Automate Version 25.1?

Updated 8/27/2025

Automate 25.1 has been released! Here’s what you’ll see in our latest version:

Revamped Automate Agent

We've fully rebuilt the agent in C# and .NET 8 for improved stability and support that resolves memory leak issues. The legacy agent will still be available if needed.

Trigger Queuing

Adds the ability to aggregate trigger messages. This will reduce network traffic and overhead, improve server performance and stability, and reduce potential for agent disconnect.

And more! 

See more of what’s new in the Automate 25.1 Release Notes.

Automate Customers: Download Automate 25.1 by visiting  Fortra Support, logging in to your user account, and selecting Automate as your product name, and navigating to “View Downloads” under the “Downloads” section. 

Still don’t have a Fortra Support user account?  Register now!  

What's New in Automate Version 24.2?

Updated 6/25/2024

Automate 24.2 has been released! Here’s what you’ll see in our latest version: 

Agent Notifications

Adds the ability to send email notifications when an agent connects to or disconnects from the Automate server.

Dynamics 365 Action

Adds the ability to automate a variety of common Dynamics 365 operations, such as managing contacts, retrieving records, tracking specific information, and uploading and downloading attachments.

EvaluateExpression(Expression) Extended Function

Adds the ability to evaluate an Automate variable that contains an expression originating from a secondary source (for example, a database, Excel, JSON, etc.).

Web Browser Action Enhancement

Added the “Use deep search” parameter to the Web Browser (Click), (Extract table), and (Get value) activities, which provides the ability to search for and allow the selection of HTML elements under shadow roots on websites with a shadow DOM structure.

And more! 

See more of what’s new in the Automate 24.2 Release Notes.

Automate Customers: Download Automate 24.2 by visiting  Fortra Support, logging in to your user account, and selecting Automate as your product name, and navigating to “View Downloads” under the “Downloads” section. 

Still don’t have a Fortra Support user account?  Register now!  

What's New in Automate Version 24.1?

Updated 3/4/2024

Automate 24.1 has been released! Here’s what you’ll see in our latest version: 

ROI Calculator 

Now you can physically see the value of Automate in real time. The ROI Calculator displays cost savings and other key metrics so users can evaluate the impact of automation practices with ease. 

Updated SFTP Component: Supported Ciphers 

The SFTP Component has been updated to support additional key exchange algorithms for increased compatibility with existing or future FTP client requirements. 

Component Upgrade: D365 

We’ve added additional support for D365 online, including modem authentication. 

Custom Actions Sessions 

Automate’s Custom Actions now provide support for “sessions” between activities.  

And more!  

See more of what’s new in the Automate 24.1 Release Notes. 

Automate Customers: Download Automate 24.1 by visiting  Fortra Support, logging in to your user account, and selecting Automate as your product name, and navigating to “View Downloads” under the “Downloads” section.  

Still don’t have a Fortra Support user account?  Register now!  

What's New in Automate Version 23.1?

Updated 10/16/2023

Automate 23.1 has been released! Here’s what you’ll see in our latest version: 

Custom Actions 

With Custom Actions, power users can bring their own functionality to the Automate platform. Get the ability to create native actions for virtually any application, platform, or service with an SDK. 

• Create your own custom actions and sub-actions without starting from scratch. Reuse them anytime, on any machine—just drag and drop. 

• Quickly move from initial concept to user-friendly custom actions to share with citizen developers, with the same look and feel that the Automate platform provides. 

• Get the flexibility to pick and choose what is available from the SDK to meet business needs and modify how you want your custom actions to behave. 

• Ensure all end-users are leveraging the same touchpoint for building automation. 

User Interface Enhancements 

The user interface for Automate has been updated to provide an improved user experience. 

And more!  

See more of what’s new in the Automate 23.1 Release Notes. 

Automate Customers: Download Automate 23.1 by visiting the  Fortra Community Portal, logging in to your user account, and selecting “My Product Downloads” under the “Downloads” dropdown.  

Still don’t have a Fortra Community Portal user account? Register now!  

What's New in Automate Version 22.1?

Updated 1/17/2023

Automate 22.1 has been released! Here’s what you’ll see in our latest version:

New Welcome Tab

We’re making it even easier to connect with the RPA community—right within Automate. You’ll find quick access to:

• Get user tutorials in our newly improved Automate Academy
• Download pre-built bots in the Automation Connector Hub
• Request support, services, and much more!

Optimized Variable Engine

The Variable Engine has been optimized to improve overall system performance.

Enhanced SharePoint Action

We’ve updated our SharePoint Action to work with SharePoint Online and support modern authentication.

And more! 

See more of what’s new in the Automate 22.1 Release Notes.

Automate Customers: Download Automate 22.1 by visiting the Fortra Community Portal, logging in to your user account, and selecting “My Product Downloads” under the “Downloads” dropdown. 

Still don’t have a Fortra Community Portal user account? Register now! 

What's New in Automate Version 11.7?

Updated 8/8/2022

Automate 11.7 has been released! Here’s what you’ll see in our latest version:

Enhanced JSON Action

We've vastly enhanced the JSON action to make working with web APIs and encapsulated data much easier. JSON responses now include a visible format structure and the ability to drill in and select values.

Check out a  short demo of the updated JSON action.

IE Compatibility Within Edge

We've expanded our browser action, with Internet Explorer compatibility mode inside the Edge browser.

More UI Automation Capability

We’ve also extended our capabilities in UI automation through the ability to run JavaScript.

And more! 

See more of what’s new in the Automate 11.7 Release Notes.

Automate Customers: Download Automate 11.7 by visiting the Fortra Community Portal, logging in to your user account, and selecting “My Product Downloads” under the “Downloads” dropdown. 

Still don’t have a Fortra Community Portal user account? Register now! 

What's New in Automate Version 11.6?

Updated 9/9/2021

Automate 11.6 has been released! Here’s what you’ll see in our latest version:

Automate Recorder 

We've improved our web automation capabilities so users can more easily and reliably build automation—and in half the time—with the Automate Recorder. Here's how you can quickly and easily build, accelerate, and distribute automation for both desktop and browser-based applications with the Recorder:

• Step Approach Provides Immediate Feedback
  Steps can be tested as UI automation is built, eliminating the need to wait until the end of a recording to find out if a step is broken.
• Simplified Management and Upkeep of Recordings
  Recordings can be easily edited to add, modify, move, or delete steps as needed. Recordings can be re-entered to apply fixes and updates at any time.
• Intermix UI and Business Logic in Recordings
  The Recorder doesn’t just capture exactly what is performed on screen, but also has the ability to add non-UI steps such as loops, expressions, if statements, and more, to create real-world, robust recordings.

Check out a short demo of the Automate Recorder in our RPA Video Library.

Terminal Action Enhancements

We’ve added support for SSL/TLS to the Terminal activity to improve IBM i connectivity along with other new enhancements to the Terminal Action. See a short demo of the Terminal Action updates in our RPA Video Library.

Web Browser Action Enhancements

We've added new Web Browser activities to make it easier than ever to work with web pages, including actions to refresh a page, go back and forth between pages, and interact with tabs in a browser. See a short demo of the Web Browser Action updates in our RPA Video Library.

And more! 

See more of what’s new in the Automate 11.6 Release Notes. 

What's New in Automate Version 11.5?

Updated 3/31/2021

Automate 11.5 has been released! Here’s what you’ll see in our latest version:

Automate Recorder 

It’s now even easier to build automation with the Automate Recorder. Use it to record the actions you’re taking on Windows desktop applications—like navigation and clicks. Use recorded steps in conjunction with already built tasks in the Task Builder to enhance your automation. Check out this video for a quick example! 

Edge Browser Support 

We’ve expanded our browser support to ensure coverage for all major browsers—now including Microsoft Edge. 

Improved OCR Recognition 

With the addition of the Google Tesseract OCR engine, we’ve brought improved accuracy to our OCR capabilities and expanded the languages we support to include Hebrew and Japanese. 

For more details on everything included in this release, learn more in the Automate release notes.

What's New in Automate Version 11.4?

Updated 8/26/2020

Get Enhanced Bot Security and Machine Learning Capabilities

Automate RPA Software version 11.4 has been released! As we continually work hard to improve the Automate experience, we are excited to share how our latest version gives users more enterprise-grade security features and extended automation capabilities through machine learning and application integration.

Enhanced Enterprise-Grade RPA Security Features

RPA bots often handle sensitive data as part of your business processes. That’s why it’s important to ensure proper security in your bots or tasks. Automate has always provided security features to keep your data safe and have further improved on them in this latest release. With these new features, Automate 11.4 brings comprehensive security to credentials and other sensitive data items.

Secure variables and secure credentials go hand-in-hand when it comes to bot security. When creating a variable, users can enable a ‘secure variable’ setting which will obscure the value of the variable while a task is being edited. This allows for stronger security in tasks that integrate with applications that require credential and password access. And for Automate Plus and Ultimate users, 11.4 introduces secure credentials which, once created, are permanently masked, and access and use can be controlled to ensure credentials are not compromised.

Giving multiple users access to view and edit credentials to a particular system, such as an FTP server, is not a secure way to run automation. For example, a manager may have access to view and edit credentials to your FTP server, but the team members building the automation tasks don’t. Instead of having to share credentials in ways that aren’t secure, Automate users can implement secure credentials. These can be used by any permissible group of users in an Automate task without risking security, allowing for seamless automation and secure integration between systems.

Combine the Power of RPA with Machine Learning Capabilities

As we look to the future of automation, we’re excited to help users combine the power of RPA with machine learning. As you use Automate to streamline your most tedious, repetitive, rules-based tasks, machine learning lets you expand your automation to include tasks where more critical thinking is needed. This is accomplished in 11.4 through an integration between Automate Plus or Ultimate and an existing machine learning framework, specifically ML.NET from Microsoft.

Machine learning and RPA can be used to solve complex problems, like interpreting text or image files, generating forecasts, sentiment analysis, or making product recommendations—just to name a few. For example, when you’re trying to improve the customer experience and need to know what your customers are saying about your organization, this is often a very manual process. From reading through review sites and going through NPS surveys, then taking an appropriate response or action, this type of work can be time consuming.

Luckily, you can streamline the process with RPA and machine learning. An RPA bot can pull Yelp reviews and have your trained machine learning model classify the review as positive or negative and then take the appropriate remediation action. If you’ve got a bad review, get an automatic alert so a team member can take action, or a preset reply can be sent from the system. These capabilities give you back your time to focus on putting your customer experience first.

Extended Automation Capabilities

Automate has always stood out for providing native API integration capabilities. And with the 11.4 release, we’ve added more enhancements that make it even easier to integrate third-party systems with Automate. We’ve enhanced the way data is passed directly into tasks and workflows from third-party applications, extended our API integration to support industry standards such as REST and OAuth, and made it even easier to move data to and from third-party systems.

Automate 11.4 also simplifies how all Automate users work with third-party applications by masking the complexities of the different authentication mechanisms, interchange formats, HTTP sessions, and more. For example, when you need to pull data from third-party applications like SAP or Salesforce for generating reports, users can now define the connection and authentication scheme within Automate and use it in various tasks and workflows to import data needed to generate the reports.

For more details on everything included in this release, learn more in the Automate release notes.

What's New in Automate Version 11.3?

Updated 3/30/2020

Automate 11.3 has been released! This release includes the following new features and fixes:

• New dataset action allows users to create and customize their own datasets, making bot creation and administration more efficient.
• Resolution of issues with agent disconnection
• Fixes of customer-reported bugs
• The Running Task Window now includes a timer that displays how long a task has been running.
• Support for web browser automation using Google Chrome was added with the new Web Browser action, released in version 11.2.1.
• Added the ability to select an open web browser window in the new Web Browser action using Windows Dissection Technology (magnifier icon).

What's New in Automate Version 11.2?

Updated 9/13/2019

Automate 11.2 has been released! This release includes enhancements that will help further streamline your RPA functionality with web browser automation tasks, desktop applications, and more. Read on for more about the new enhancements and how you can take your RPA experience to the next level with an even more easy-to-use Automate RPA software.

Web Browser Enhancements

More than 70% of internet users are using either Chrome, Firefox, or Internet Explorer as their web browser and Automate customers just like you are using Automate for web browser automation tasks like screen scraping, data extraction, filling in web forms, and more. With Automate’s enhanced web browser action, users can build complex tasks in the latest version of their web browser. This helps keep your efficiency high when building web browser automation tasks.

Have current tasks already built that are working with older versions of these browsers? You can keep these tasks working with our Legacy Web Browser Action. But if you’re looking to create new tasks, perhaps in a new browser, then our new Web Browser Action will help you efficiently build these workflows, separate from your legacy tasks.

Enhancements to Desktop Interactivity Action

Working alongside RPA robots lets you streamline your most repetitive tasks to boost productivity and improve accuracy. The latest enhancement in Automate aims to help you work even more efficiently with robotic desktop automation. With enhancements to the Interactivity Action, Automate can now interact with more parts of desktop applications. These enhancements allow Automate to “see” more types of controls in other applications than it could before, and to get more information about them. This makes it easier for you to select exactly what you need, helping you work more efficiently by providing more depth and breadth into how Automate interacts with applications.

Improved Load Balancing

Automate Plus users will see a more improved load balancing experience. Instead of the user needing to manually set up jobs based on capacity, an option has been added for the system to decide at run-time which bot will run the job or task based on which one is least busy. This will allow you to have the most resources available to run tasks at any given moment and make it simpler for you to plan your workflows.

What's New in Automate Version 11.1?

Updated 9/13/2018

Formally known as Automate Enterprise

Automate 11.1 has been released! This release introduces two new features to help make Automate Plus an even more flexible solution for your organization—object-level revision management and the recycle bin. Learn more about these features and other add-on feature options:

Object-Level Revision Management

When an object, such as a workflow, task, condition or process is changed, a revision is created from the previous version of the object and stored in the database. Each unique revision is easy for users to recognize and compare. Previous revisions can be restored and used again or any revision can be deleted when no longer needed. And with object-level revision management, permissions can be set to restrict the ability to delete and restore revisions.

Recycle Bin

When an object, such as a workflow, task, condition or process is deleted, it is moved into the Recycle Bin. Objects in the Recycle Bin are restorable if needed. In order to permanently remove the object from the system, you can delete them from the Recycle Bin. Permissions can be set on an object-level, restricting the ability to delete and restore the object, or on a system-level, controlling the ability to view the contents of the Recycle Bin.

What's New in Automate Version 11?

Updated 3/24/2017

We are excited to announce the release of Automate Desktop and Automate Plus Version 11. If you were familiar with Fortra automation solutions before, you may have noticed the name change—Automate BPA Server is now known as Automate Plus. But that’s not the only update you have to look forward to when you download v11.

Product Updates

Two new actions have been added to provide you with even more options as you build your tasks and workflows.

Email Trigger

The new email trigger allows you to monitor an Exchange mailbox for emails matching complex criteria. For example, filter according to the from email address, subject, attachment name, or size. When an incoming email matching your criteria is received, your task or workflow will begin executing immediately.

JSON Action

Convert a JSON encoded string into Automate variable engine objects or vice versa. This function can be useful when data is returned from a web service call in JSON data format and needs to be decoded into a format usable by an Automate Plus workflow. Data can also be encoded from a DataSet into a JSON string for posting or sending with a web service request.

Optimized Task Builder

The Automate Task Builder has the same look and feel you are familiar with, but it has been further optimized for usability and includes features like:

• Data value highlighting
• Dockable panels
• New variable inspection system
• Simplified events/functions editing

Updated Task Engine

The new task engine was retooled and now provides a solid platform for future enhancements. The internal AML format has been upgraded to v3.

Automate Plus Enhancements

Automate products are all about scalability. Start with your current requirements—whether that is robotic process automation of a few tasks or comprehensive enterprise automation—and expand your automation strategy as your organization grows and evolves.

Automate Plus v11 offers increased flexibility to scale the product for your unique needs. You will now be able to purchase individual features you need as add-ons to your platform, like those below.

Enhanced Security and Audit Platform

As automation requirements grow, the need for security increases. Automate Plus's Security and Audit platform includes enterprise-class features like:

• Active Directory integration. User roles and system level access can be controlled by departments using Active Directory authentication. Query Active Directory and log user information, or generate Active Directory audit reports.
• User and group permissions. Assign specific permissions to every individual, team, and department in your organization and give them permission to only the necessary workflows and agents.
• Change history. Every step in workflow creation and subsequent change is recorded in audit logs. This allows errors to be traced back to the origin point.
• Notifications. In the event a workflow fails, all information is logged and can be sent to administrators or groups via email.
• Custom logs. Aggregate, monitor, and manage business specific workflow such as FTP transfer statistics, file processing and throughput metrics, and more.

Operations Console

The Automate Plus Ops Console gives you the ability to monitor and manage everything that’s happening across your organization from wherever you are. By providing a simple way to see detailed operational analytics and control your processes from any device, the Server Ops Console helps you make better and faster strategic decisions.

• SLA Management. Being able to access reports and manage your processes from anywhere ensures that critical SLAs will be met.
• Single Pane of Glass. Central view of upcoming, active, and completed items, with the ability to drill down into the specifics of any workflow. This flexibility lets potential problems be diagnosed anywhere, from any device.
• Mobilized and Responsive. View processes and run, stop, pause, resume, enable, or disable any action from a mobile device. Web-based, responsive interface allows users to take action immediately, from anywhere.
• Customizable UI. User-defined dashboards give you deeper insights into operations across your organization.