Things are relatively quiet on the OPC News front this week.  There are a few events happening in the not to distant future to be aware of:

• ·        The OPC Expo / IndConn that is part of Connectivity Week, being held at Santa Clara Convention Center on June 8 -11th.
• ·        The OPC Interoperability Workshop in Tokyo, Japan – June 16-18^th
• ·        MatrikonOPC Expo – Singapore 2009 which is coming up in August 21st

A while back we also made some small changes here on the OPC Exchange blog, that I forgot to point out.  The right hand column now has the Blog Topics and Categories section to help you find related posts.  If there are other categories you would like to see let me know.

We also added the Most Popular Top 5 Posts section.  This gets updated on a rolling 3 month window, based on the most popular posts.  Not surprisingly lately people are interested in OPC Advantage in Tough Times and Security Gateway and OPC UA.

Lot’s of things happening on the OPC front this last little while, and they all relate to security in some way. 

• First off is Digital Bond has released the Bandolier security audit files for the MatrikonOPC Security Gateway and Tunneller servers. These products can add some important security features to an OPC installation including granular tag permissions and better DCOM handling. The Bandolier files verify that these applications themselves and the underlying OS are in an optimal security configuration. Like all the other releases, there is one file for the OS-level checks and one for the application checks.
• Jason Holcomb of Digital Bond presented on Bandolier at the recent OPC North American User Group in Houston. This was one of several OPC security themed talks that were presented at the user group.  The message many attendees voiced was “Security is very important to us”.   This message has been coming across for quite some time know, which is why OPC products like Security Gateway and Tunneller exist to meet the need for security technology that connects the process world to the business world.  For those who missed the user group, there will be an opportunity to view the presentations on-line.  I’ll be blogging on when that’s available.
• And of course any discussion on OPC and security has to talk about DCOM.  In case anyone missed it, there is now a free DCOM Analyzer tool available. You can download MatrikonOPC Analyzer for free from this link.

It’s good to see that in spite of the economic pressures everyone is facing these days, that security is still a priority.  This article show that Homeland Security is doing both, saving money on security J

This is the 200^th posting for the OPC Exchange blog, so I wanted to do something a little different.  We’ve been kicking around the idea for ‘Coffee Break OPC’ for a while now.  Everyone is very busy, and few people have much time to spend on learning new things, or even the time to find out what they should be making time to learn!  Everyone takes a few minutes a day for a coffee break, so why not use that five minutes to learn a little bit?  The animation format lets you read along if you want or just sit back and listen, and hopefully enjoy it a bit.  I did my best to keep things more interesting than a powerpoint bullet list.

Let me know what you think, and what other topics you’d like to hear 5 minutes on.

01. Coffee Break OPC by MatrikonOPC

 If you do have more time to spend and would like to get more in depth information, here’s a list of resources:

• OPC Tutorials
• OPC: The Ins and Outs to What It’s About (The Every Man’s Guide to OPC)
• MatrikonOPC eLearning:  OPC Training that fits your Schedule

I just can’t say that without quirking one eyebrow and bringing my pinky to the corner of my mouth.  I blame Mike Meyers.  It’s been a busy few weeks, with lots of stuff happening on the OPC front.  Since I’ve been negligent in getting blog posts out, I’ll list them all now…

1. The blog post refers to MatrikonOPC donating $1 million in kind to the NAIT Johnson Controls Centre for Building Environment Technology.  MatrikonOPC has always had a close relationship with NAIT, and it just makes sense that the technologists of the future are well versed in real-world tools like OPC that are used in industry today.  Could you consider this a stimulus package that helps students become successful HVAC specialists?  I assume this includes free copies of Extending Building Automation Data Visibility Using OPC for every student J
2. The Live Multi-Vendor OPC UA Demonstration at the MatrikonOPC Houston User Group. This demonstration will showcase OPC UA and recently released UA components. Don’t miss it.
3. The OPC Foundation TAC has approved the Charter for the “OPC UA Accelerated Adoption Working Group”.  This is the ‘working group for the second generation of the OPC Unified Architecture’ that was mentioned in the latest OPConnect newsletter.  More details on this very soon.
4. OPC UA Java Software Development Kit now available:  The first beta for the OPC UA Java SDK is now available for download.  A lot of Corporate Members have been waiting on this SDK for some time now.  Let the Java fun begin.

That about brings everyone up to date for now.  On a personal note, this counts as the 199^th blog post for OPC Exchange!  I’ll have to do something special for number 200.

No, it’s not an April Fools joke.  The folks in MatrikonOPC’s development group has released another one of their testing tools as a free OPC utility.  The MatrikonOPC Analyzer is a utility used to find common OPC problem areas and backup important OPC-related files. Used by support technicians at MatrikonOPC for years, this software is now being made available to the public.  The tool produces a system snapshot that can be checked for common issues. This significantly cuts down on the time it takes to check the most common OPC problem areas.  The MatrikonOPC Analzyer will…

·          Back up XML configuration files and OPC Server log files

·          Checks common OPC problem areas such as firewall settings, DEP, network settings, as well as event log and MS update information

·          Summarizes default COM settings, OPCEnum settings, and OPC Server-specific DCOM settings

Basically it’s a one stop shop for troubleshooting installation problems.  You can download MatrikonOPC Analyzer for free from this link.

Other good DCOM troubleshooting resources are the Using OPC via DCOM with Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 whitepaper and the MatrikonOPC Test Tools Explained webcast.