Automation & Control Software Learning Resources for the New Year

The New Year is a time of renewal, new projects, new challenges, and for some of you, new roles, or new people on your teams.  The last year has been one where our team has grown and worked to deliver the relevant content you need to learn more about software for automation & control, how to use our products, and the type of problems we solve.

In this blog post, we’ll provide a quick review of some key items from the last year that can help you or your colleagues in the coming year.  If you aren’t already subscribed to our blog, we encourage you to subscribe using the form at the right . We publish new content at least once a week, sometimes more often, and you can control the frequency of when you are notified of new content.

– After 22 years in business, we’re hearing from more and more people that are new to industrial control, and wanting to learn more. To help those users, we’ve started an Automation 101 blog section that we’ll continue to add to this year.
– Join our own Marc Holbach helping new users learn about what OPC UA is and why it matters.
- Our Cogent Datahub offering is a frequent “go-to” solution for a wide range of data integration challenges and use cases.  So this dedicated blog is filled with video tutorials, examples of problems solved, and more to help you see the wide-ranging possibilities.
	– OPC UA provides the ability to encrypt connections between OPC servers and clients, but setting that up properly can be challenging. In this video tutorial we show you ways to make it easy.  .
– OPC DA, OPC A&E, OPC UA – it’s acronym soup. Want to know why there are so many types of OPC?  . If you need to move data between them, especially between OPC DA Classic and OPC UA,  to learn how to break down any obstacles in your existing systems.
	– Many of you probably use TOP Server, and this was a big year, with 4 releases to improve on TOP Server V6.  To help you learn more, we’ve started a TOP Server specific blog.
– As you probably realize, industrial communications involves a lot of moving parts.  It’s always a good idea to be aware of the tools available to you - so this is a must-read for new users.  .
	– The LGH file format has been around a long time, but we’ve seen our users do some really clever things in system migrations and upgrades using the  visual export and reporting tool. .
- Celebrating 23 years as a solution used worldwide, we’ve created a series of blog posts to help you understand how to use  to connect your devices.  .
	- Here is another instance of things we’ve learned from our loyal users about how they really want to store data.  It’s rarely as simple as “just log this whenever the value changes”.  .
– the OPC UA standards, which you can learn about in the video tutorial above, saw strong growth in usage this last year.  Learn how the evolution of toolkits for Visual Studio.NET development make it easier than before.  .
	We hope you have found this useful. Don't forget to  to our blog to receive updates for future useful content automatically, and as always, if you have questions please .