Software Toolbox Technical Blog

In today’s industrial environments, securing and streamlining data communication is essential. If you're not familiar with OPC Router, it’s a powerful software solution that integrates various industrial, business, and IoT data sources. With its drag-and-drop visual workflows, scalable configuration templates, and platform-independent browser-based interface, OPC Router helps you connect systems quickly and efficiently.

When combined with Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), OPC Router gains enhanced security and user management features, making it ideal for modern industrial setups. But how do you deploy this combination in a modern environment like a Docker container?

In this blog post, we’ll break down the concepts of Docker and Entra ID and guide you through implementing them in your OPC Router system. But before diving into the specifics, it’s important to understand the foundational terms.

Software Toolbox has provided AVEVA™ (formerly Wonderware) users, integrators, OEMs, and channel partners in over 100 countries with best-in-class connectivity solutions since 1996. Many of you will be familiar with our TOP Server for AVEVA that offers a wide range of device connectivity options and client interfaces such as SuiteLink, OPC DA, and OPC UA. While TOP Server is known for its extensive list of driver options that allow for connectivity to thousands of device types, they are only part of how TOP Server helps with integrating your industrial data with AVEVA software. How does the device data actually make its way into AVEVA?

In this video blog, we'll show you how to make a basic connection from AVEVA InTouch to TOP Server using SuiteLink, a communications protocol that runs over TCP/IP at the application layer, created by Wonderware to succeed FastDDE in the mid-1990's. Unlike OPC DA, SuiteLink doesn’t rely on COM or DCOM technology, making SuiteLink a common choice for remote connectivity to Software Toolbox solutions. With an integrated SuiteLink interface, no OI Gateway or FSGateway is required to get your InTouch application connected to a wide range of additional device types.

Welcome back to our Data Storage Deep Dive series, where we have been exploring the possibilities of integrating our variety of industrial automation software solutions with historians to allow for a deeper understanding of trends within your data. In our previous installment, Software Toolbox Helps You Fly Higher with Canary Historian, we demonstrated how TOP Server, OmniServer and DataHub can collect data from unique sources with different communication needs to Canary Data Historian for aggregation and analysis. Today, we are going to look at how OPC Router can be used to extract the historical data and expose it in an intuitive format for any OPC UA Client to consume.

The TOP Server^® from Software Toolbox and KEPServerEX^® from the Kepware division of PTC^® are well known connectivity solutions for extracting industrial automation data from PLCs and other devices, and integrating that data with virtually any HMI, SCADA, MES, Historian, or database on the market. These products have a global installed base serving sophisticated users across every industry imaginable.

Welcome to the next installment of our Data Storage Deep Dive series! For years, Software Toolbox has been synonymous with terms like “device connectivity” and “data integration” thanks to our variety of connectivity solutions that help collect real-time data for all your industrial automation operations. Beyond just real-time data, our team recognizes the value of historical data within the industry, and we aim to help businesses make larger data backed decisions over time.

Welcome to the kickoff post of our Data Storage Deep Dive blog series! In this series, we will explore the crucial role of data storage solutions and Historians in industrial automation. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be looking into how solutions delivered by Software Toolbox can be utilized with Historians, helping you make the most of your industrial data.

OmniServer is a universal data acquisition software application designed to bi-directionally retrieve information from a wide range of Ethernet, serial, or USB devices that use 'non-standard' protocols to communicate, such as weigh scales, barcode readers, lab instruments, inspection machines, printers, & more. This data is then typically delivered by OmniServer to HMI, SCADA, MES, & Historian systems using standard protocols like OPC DA, OPC UA, & AVEVA Suitelink.

Building on last week’s Cogent DataHub v11 Security Enhancements Deep Dive blog, this post dives into a practical application of these security enhancement by focusing on the implementation of multifactor authentication (MFA) using a TOTP (Time-based One-time Password) key to secure a Remote Config connection to the DataHub. We will guide you through the process of setting up a built-in user with the “RemoteConfig” role, ensuring that remote access is equipped with the necessary permissions. To further strengthen security, we’ll integrate a TOTP key with an authentication app and define an IP pattern Principal to restrict access to specific source network locations. We’ll conclude by performing a successful login from a different system, thus verifying the effectiveness of our secure setup.