In this article, I am going to cover a new use case scenario for Bot enabled AgilePoint NX application where you want to create secured bot which asks known user to be authenticated before bot starts performing the work on behalf of the user.

I am going to utilize one of my previous bot demos to add authentication to it. Often times organizations have a requirement of working with external vendors and partners who have to submit their invoices or other documents back to Finance department for processing. Currently a lot of organizations handle this through emails and manual processing as they do not wish to open up their internal apps to external vendors outside their company firewall which is a security concern.

The same scenario can be extended to internal employees as well for expense reimbursement where they might want to just take a picture of a receipt and upload it for reimbursement.

However it is still desired that the user should be authenticated and known to the system to avoid unknown people from submitting such invoices. This can be easily achieved using authentication types like Windows Azure Active Directory which support authentication from both internal employees as well as external partners using Azure B2C and Azure B2B setup. It also makes sure that all the actions being performed by the Bot are subject to the permissions of the logged in user.

In this demo, I am going to show how a partner/employee is asked to authenticate by the Bot using Azure AD and once authenticated he can upload an invoice using Skype Bot which takes the file and passes on to AgilePoint NX which parses data out of the invoice and shows that on the form as well as insert the invoice details back to Salesforce system for accounting purpose and all of this is done automatically without having to open up any connections for partners through your firewall but at the same time we execute the authentication flow for the user so that his identity is determined using partner auth types like Azure B2C before work is performed by the Bot. Though I use Salesforce in my example, it could very well be replaced by SAP, NetSuite etc.

User authentication in bot will give your IT team peace of mind and an entire audit trail around who interacted with the bot. If you wish to get user authenticated bots created for your organization, please contact your AgilePoint account manager to schedule consultation with a services team member.

Here is a short video on how authentication might work with your bot scenario.