Software Toolbox Technical Blog

Welcome to our most popular blog post of the year! Each year we publish this blog post to help you learn, grow, and support empowering you to improve your business.

This post is our 7th annual sharing of references to learning resources including our ever hot Tech Support Corner, popular technical blog posts, and product capabilities that users have told us were the most helpful to them over the course of the last year.

2023 continued the challenges in supply chain, inflation, labor shortages, and exploding customer demand and in many cases technology continues to be a key part of dealing with the challenges.

In today's blog post, I reach out to you in tribute to Kevin M. Rutherford, our dear friend and colleague. 

It is with an exceptionally heavy heart that I am writing to share that Kevin passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on May 14, 2023. Our compassion, love and support go out to his wife Jennifer, Kevin's family, their friends and extended family at this time of loss. Last week, we held a week of silence on this blog in honor of Kevin. This week we felt moved to honor Kevin here, the place many of you heard from him regularly and share what he meant to us, partners, & clients around the world. Bear with us, as we have a lot to say, but we loved Kevin and he will be missed forever. 

This week's post is a technical update to share news about updates released for DataHub and OPC Data Logger, reminders about the value of the Tech Support corner, and your last warning about DCOM Hardening before the Windows update next week!

The team is working on some more tech tips and video tutorials that you'll start seeing later this month. Meanwhile, here's this week's update.

Ongoing digital transformation and operational visibility initiatives continue to demand the integration of different systems using different technologies. With increased adoption of secure OPC UA and MQTT Sparkplug B, it’s only to be expected that users will have systems that support one or the other technology but need to communicate with each other.

Although OPC UA supports a publish-subscribe mechanism with OPC UA PubSub, and adoption of OPC UA is strong and growing, the reality is there will be situations where the user is already using MQTT Sparkplug B and needs to integrate it with OPC UA or vice-versa, without writing custom code or going through complex configuration.

Software Toolbox was founded in 1996 on the principal of making data and device integration easy by using configurable off-the-shelf software to avoiding writing custom solutions and knowing the pros and cons of and ins and outs of many technologies. That mission remains strong, as you’ll see, as we discuss interoperating between OPC UA and MQTT in this blog post.

The LGH File Inspector software solution enables rapid query and export of Wonderware InTouch LGH files to Excel & CSV for analysis and reporting. With Version 2.0, user feedback on how they use the tool has been incorporated to add functionality in three major areas: Flexibility, User Experience, and Global User Support.

In this blog post, we review what’s new and why you want to upgrade to Version 2.0, and how you can upgrade.

The 2018.3 release of the OPC Data Client toolkit continues to make OPC UA client development easier, more secure and interoperable, while continuing to support OPC DA, A&E, and XML-DA development.

In this blog post I have taken the release notes and boiled it down to the key benefits that might drive you to upgrade, get back on support, renew support, or, if you’re new to OPC client development, try our OPC Data Client toolkit.

Recently we worked with an aluminum smelter operation that has doubled in size since it first opened and has made a significant positive impact on the local economy by supplying aluminum to local industries which has fueled their growth.

Like any growing business, this user is always seeking ways to improve operations and reduce risk of downtime. In the end they need to deliver returns to their shareholders while continuing to support the local community, all of which requires consistent predictable operational results.  In this blog post, we'll cover how they used an off-the-shelf solution for integrating varied systems to reduce life cycle costs.

Earlier this year, we shared the story of how Namibia Breweries Ltd is using off-the-shelf open OPC software in their operations management system.  In that story, we shared how we had learned making beer in one of the world’s driest places takes some unique approaches to power sourcing, water management, and really all resources.

We visited with Namibia Brewing again recently when they attended the X-Change 2018 conference in the beautiful Central Drakensberg region of South Africa.   I had the chance to sit down with Annemarie Kruger, Renaldo Du Pisani, and Andre Engelbrecht and, in this blog post, you'll learn about how they have continued to evolve their system since I visited their site in 2017.