It’s a new year and a new decade and, as everything moves faster, we all have to keep our knowledge and skills current.
In this blog post, we provide a quick reference to learning resources that users have told us were the most helpful to them over the course of the last year.
If you aren’t already subscribed to our blog, we encourage you to subscribe . We publish new content about once a week, sometimes more often, and you can control when you are notified of new content.
The use of certificates in cryptographic applications and online communication protocols is nothing new and can practically be traced all the way back to the 1970's when the "framework" for public key encryption (more on this in a future blog) came into being. With the (now-not-so-recent) Industry 4.0 movement coming out of Europe, and the design and operation changes brought about by the IIoT phenomenon, we are seeing more and more systems – that have traditionally been air-gapped and kept offline – being brought online to take advantage of the digital revolution in which we find ourselves.
Despite how you feel about this (r)evolution there are several exciting changes that are being brought about, including the one I want to discuss is the increased adoption of OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) in automation systems.
In this first post in our ongoing Exploring OPC UA blog series, we will look at what OPC UA Certificates are and what they provide and subsequent posts will further explore how they are used in OPC UA, how they fit into the security ‘stack’ of OPC UA and will then look at how OPC UA Certificates are utilized and managed in several Software Toolbox applications. First thing’s first however; what are OPC UA Certificates and what are they used for?
Those of you even somewhat familiar with OmniServer are likely aware that OmniServer is frequently used for accessing information from devices that use ‘non-standard’ protocols including such devices as weight scales, barcode readers, and printers either over serial connections or Ethernet connections.
Over the past several years, we've been working to evolve the OmniServer user experience with the goal of making it easier and more efficient to build a non-standard protocol/driver.
In this video blog post, we will step through the most powerful features of the new visual protocol editor for OmniServer, demonstrating the key enhancements to the user experience that will make integrating your non-standard devices easier and faster than ever.
DCOM security and its headaches continue to be a popular support topic - our DCOM tutorial videos consistently receive the most visits each month. Speak to any OPC Classic user in the industrial automation space and they always have their own horror stories about fighting the woes of DCOM.
In our continuing Tech Support Corner blog series, this blog post provides you with a high-level review of the troubleshooting resources we make available to our users including a DCOM companion checklist that can be used with our DCOM tutorials.
You more than likely just received one of my emails recently or possibly heard from a colleague about our latest TOP Server release. Either way, you'll want to continue reading about the new features in TOP Server V6.8 for Wonderware.
In this post, I'm going to go through some of the key features released in V6.8 in more detail, including the continued focus on the highest level of security, updates for ControlLogix firmware support, enhancements to the Torque Tool Ethernet driver, EFM driver updates, DNP3 updates and more, including how they benefit you as a TOP Server user.
If you're a new TOP Server for AVEVA (formerly Wonderware) user, or just a user that's been away from TOP Server for awhile, perhaps you need a quick refresher on how to get around in TOP Server.
Continuing our Tech Support Corner blog series, this video blog post covers the basic components of TOP Server and how to familiarize yourself with using TOP Server via the simulation project that installs with TOP Server. If you're looking for more advanced or driver specific TOP Server videos, visit the TOP Server Video Library
With the recently released 2019.2 (5.56) version of the OPC Data Client Toolkit, developers of OPC UA custom client applications can now add the latest extension to the OPC UA specifications, PubSub, short for Publish-Subscribe, to their applications. This version also brings items of value for developers of any type of OPC client application, and also highlights some updates from a 2019.1 release we did last month to prepare for this big release.
In this blog post, we will cover the most significant updates to OPC Data Client and how they will benefit you and your custom OPC client projects.
If you've used Dream Report, you know it is a real-time report generator and dashboard solution and how quickly and easily configurable it is for data collection, archival of data and alarms and also analysis.
In this post, we'll go through five key features of the V5.0 R19-3 release of Dream Report and how those features benefit existing and new Dream Report users.
