Winautomation login with Power Automate Licence stopped working

[3TA]

Hi

As of today WinAutomation with Power Automate Licence Login has stopped working.

I have a per user Power Automate Attended RPA licence.

I have just had a windows update (Windows 10) and since then WinAutomation has asked me to log in again. When I submit my Power Automate / Azure email credential I get the following.

Sign in

Sorry, but we’re having trouble with signing you in.

AADSTS700016: Application with identifier '7afbe641-8db0-4580-96d1-b2b58538a3f3' was not found in the directory 'XXXXXXXXXXXXX'. This can happen if the application has not been installed by the administrator of the tenant or consented to by any user in the tenant. You may have sent your authentication request to the wrong tenant.

Troubleshooting details

If you contact your administrator, send this info to them.

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Request Id: d8c6c13e-e816-4bab-999c-9020aca34700

Correlation Id: 34e8b54b-dc22-4f27-bfdd-348299f6bdc4

Timestamp: 2022-11-03T17:24:56Z

Message: AADSTS700016: Application with identifier '7afbe641-8db0-4580-96d1-b2b58538a3f3' was not found in the directory 'XXXXXXXXXXXX'. This can happen if the application has not been installed by the administrator of the tenant or consented to by any user in the tenant. You may have sent your authentication request to the wrong tenant.

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If you plan on getting help for this problem, enable flagging and try to reproduce the error within 20 minutes. Flagged events make diagnostics available and are raised to admin attention.

I checked in Azure and WinAutomation was present in the Enterprise Apps section. I tried setting the flag but it did not show up in Azure. I deleted it from there thinking it would reset when I signed in but it has not and I dont know how to get it back or restore function to WinAutomation.

I need WinAutomation to work again, I am in the middle of a business-critical development and I have thousands of hours of work in my WinAutomation database, going back since 2015. There are numerous problems moving this over to PAD which I will not go into here, but it is going to be an enormous undertaking. I need WinAutomation to function.

I have tried to get support through the Power Automate licence route but when I try to log in it does not recognize my Azure/Power Automate credentials.

Please help. 

Please advise how I can restore full functionality to WinAutomation with my Power Automate Unattended RPA licence using my Azure login details as before. 

[3TA]

Thanks for the update. I have just managed to open a support ticket myself. Supposed to be getting back to me in 8 hours. There is no way to indicate it is a critical issue though, just "Minimal impact". I am in a similar position to you, migration is going to be a PIA. Was waiting for them to reach parity, which they said they would do, but in fact have not done, there are several features of WA that you cannot migrate to PAD - notably customised dialogs as well as some of the SaaS interfaces. 
The power automate licence is supposed to act as a licence for WA. There has been no indication that they would withdraw this functionality from the Power Automate Licence so perhaps it is a mistake that will be rectified.

[MathiasRT93]

Hi, Carlos

This might be a stupid question but where do you raise the ticket on the admin site?

[carlos_slim]

https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/support

Click on "+ New support request" or something like that? I have Dutch interface.

[MathiasRT93]

Thanks for your reply. I might be missing some permissions as i don't have that option.

Thanks anyways 🙂

[carlos_slim]

And another quick update, since I know that some are craving for info. But I got a reply from Microsoft. See below. Looks promising. Although I get an error activating, this will probably be sorted. And I have also asked about the end date, since the license I bought is perpetual. For reasons stated above, I will migrate. But seems good to ask anyhow. And although if course I know they did no longer develop/support WA, I was not aware they would pull the plug. And seems I am not alone here..

"Thank you so much for your response.

Please note that using WinAutomation with Power Automate license is no longer supported. Our product team had sent communications to customers advising them to migrate to Power Automate Desktop since more than a year now as the support had ended on Dec 31 2021. Please refer the article: Softomotive products end of support announcement | Microsoft Learn

However, our product team is working on extending or providing license for few months so that the customers can get some additional time to migrate the Winautomation processes to Power Automate . I had reached out to the product team and had requested them to provide the new license. They have now shared the attached license file for Winautomation. Please note that this license has an expiry of 6 months and will expire on May 4th 2023.

Please refer the below docs for steps to install the new license file:

Softomotive products end of support announcement | Microsoft Learn

Please do let me know if you have any further questions. Thank you, ...!"

[MathiasRT93]

Thanks for the update. I reached out to Microsoft as well - i am yet to receive an answer.

Do you know what makes you eligible for a license? 

[3TA]

"Please note that using WinAutomation with Power Automate license is no longer supported. "
Thank you for this information.
I have never received any communication saying this explicitly. Yes we all know its no longer supported, but to pull the plug on it and force everyone to ditch that app is quite irresponsible considering they have reneged on their promise to develop parity in PAD.
Anyway now we know where we stand. 

[ApexOrigin]

"However, our product team is working on extending or providing license for few months so that the customers can get some additional time to migrate the Winautomation processes to Power Automate."

This Microsoft person is nuts and doesn't know what he/she is talking about. We don't want support, we want the software to be licensed, and Microsoft committed to licensing WinAutomation with no end date per the very website that person quoted.

"The last day of support will be December 31, 2021. After that date, any current Softomotive customer, regardless of license type, will still be able to use their software but with no support, upgrades, and updates. This applies for all customers with no custom agreement with Softomotive."

Now they are acting like they are doing us a favor for turning back on, for only a short time, a product they said they wouldn't turn off as long as we paid our subscription??

Ridiculous.

[AgniusBartninka]

The plug has not been pulled for everyone. I still have multiple clients who are running WinAutomation on Power Automate licenses perfectly fine. It seems to only affect some clients or possibly some machines even.

I managed to get some support and received a license file for the specific client who was experiencing the issue. They were formerly a Softomotive client and had actually received a file earlier, but did not download it in time and the URL was now no longer valid. So, they issued a new file now, but it is only valid for 6 months, so we are now forced to migrate. But at least we have some time to do it properly.

[MathiasRT93]

Have your clients tried restarting their machines? On our clients the issue appears as soon as you sign out and try to sign back in.

[brooksim]

What is PAD and which plan are you on?

[AgniusBartninka]

PAD is Power Automate Desktop.

As to whether they have rebooted or not - pretty sure they haven't. But the client that did experience it, did not reboot either. It just appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the day yesterday.

[brooksim]

This is what I received in reponse to my ticket but I have not been able to make it work:

Hope you are doing well, I really appreciate your patience.

Reason: -

• The error means that there is a mismatch between the tenant where your app is registered and where you have stated in either the application code or the portal that your application is registered. In your code for the application, you need to set the tenant ID. This is generally located in either the web.config or the app settings. Then you need to register the application in the portal under the same tenant ID that you have set in your code. Also ensure that your application ID/client ID are matching on both sides and all of the values set in your app settings/web.config match what you have in the portal.

Follow below steps to get your Microsoft/OneDrive account's Client ID and tenant Id:

• Go to Microsoft Azure.
   If you have created an account with Microsoft Azure, enter your credentials to login, else create an account
• Go to Azure Active Directory
• Select App Registrations
• Click on Register an application
  
  
• Enter a Name for your application.
• Accept the default selection of Accounts in this organizational directory only (Default Directory only - Single tenant) for this application.
• Enter the name, select your desired option in Supported account types, select web option under Redirect URL
• Enter this URL
• Once you are finished, click on Register
• Here is your Application (Client) ID. Copy it and go to Certificates and Secrets
• Click on New Client Secret
• Enter description, select expiry time and click on Add
• Here is your Client Secret Key. Copy it too
• Note: Client secret values cannot be viewed, except for immediately after creation. Be sure to save the secret when created before leaving the page.
• Now paste both the Microsoft Client ID and Secret Key in their respective fields on creator software
  
  

For more details, please check with below article

Reference article: - Set up sign-in for an Azure AD organization - Azure AD B2C | Microsoft Learn

Please reply to this mail, if you have any concern.

Thank you so much for your time, great collaboration, patience, and for using Microsoft products and services, we appreciate your business. 

Have a wonderful day! 

[AgniusBartninka]

Yes, this would likely help if it was a new app. But for my case, I actually checked and the app did exist in Azure AD and the IDs did match. Also, none of those things were changed recently to cause a sudden mismatch. So, my guess is there was either an error at MS side or they may have shut down support for WinAutomation on purpose.

[3TA]

The plug has not been pulled for everyone....yet. Things take a while to roll out, but clearly there are enough people in here with the exact same issue and exact same error that this is coming down the pipe for everyone - and it fits with the gobblydegook coming out of Microsoft as pointed out earlier. They have basically said we can use WA forever without support (absolutely fine) to suddenly pulling the plug via a licensing tweak and with no actual announcement. The reference to saying they wouldnt support it for the last year is just cope, its got nothign to do with supporting it, and everything to do with killing it and forcing people onto the inferior (at the moment) PAD which you might have noticed has also crept up in price to coincide. 
"You will own nothing and you will be happy"

[ApexOrigin]

"So, my guess is there was either an error at MS side or they may have shut down support for WinAutomation on purpose."

I absolutely believe this move was no accident and was carefully planned by their management to nudge people off a cliff.

[3TA]

I also checked in Azure and exactly as you describe, it was in there and the ID etc were all correct. It seems to be in response to some change in how they are verifying the licensing, I would guess. Probably unintended, probably not interested in fixing it. I wonder if anyone has ever reverse engineered the latest version of WA to remove the licensing requirements? Nobody seems to want it, softomotive got paid, microsoft are not interested in it anymore having stripped out its utility to them and reduced its ease of use for the rest of us via PAD ugly UI, slower performance in both designer and runtime and of course applying the price increases now they have everybody where they want them.
At least we know they would never just decide they are ditching PAD like they have with so many other things, or not keep their word about future use of things.

[ApexOrigin]

Well, things have just gone from horrible to insanely bad for me. I still can't log in, but now, when I try to run the Process Migrator, all my processes are no longer showing up in the migrator, so there's nothing to migrate.

I was able to migrate one process this morning, so they were still all there just hours ago, and I didn't change anything.

What's going on?

[brooksim]

Well.  I was not able to get win automation fixed but was able to move over all my jobs to the desktop version.  This is the best article I found and the migration worked: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/troubleshoot/winautomation/softomotive-useful-in... 

[ApexOrigin]

As a follow up to my issue with not being able to migrate my processes, I found the problem.

I store my processes.dat folder in a DropBox folder so I always have full backup of my robots with the ability to roll back if needed. I have WinAutomation configured to go to that DropBox folder instead of the default folder.

I guess trying to log in 20 times caused the WinAutomation software to reset itself and use the default Documents/WinAutomation folder with only test processes.

I copied my full process.dat file to the default folder, and now I can access my processes to migrate them.

Hopefully this will help anyone that doesn't use the default folders and runs into this issue.