Hello to all my junior Archestranauts!
Apologies in advance for my lack of posts for this long duration. I’ve been knee deep in alligators with my new project in Taiwan and unfortunately working on the blog just hasn’t been a 1A priority.
I want to talk about a few things that have recently happened, giving you some insight and something get excited about.
First off, the Archestranaut was at the recent Schneider Electric Global Software Conference. That’s a really long title… I usually just like to say user’s group. It was definitely more of a challenge this year as I didn’t have anyone sponsoring me to go but it was worth every penny. For younger engineers trying to figure out how to get that small leg up I have a very succint piece of advice; Invest in Yourself! Yes your company will send you to training and provide you a laptop but they are nowhere near as interested in your success as you are. I think I’ll try to write a separate blog post about that soon. There is a lot to say on the topic.
I was lucky enough to present a customer success story. This one was a little different in that it wasn’t a success story in the sense of “look at what we did”. Instead it was “look at what we are trying to do”. Overall I felt like it was very well received. I had a lot of people come up to me afterwards with questions and complements. A nice bit of validation. Below is a link to the PDF of the PPT. Some of the slides may look a little funky b/c of animation but you get the information you need with the content.
Building an aseptic filling facility integrating Wonderware System
I also got a chance to see some of the new improvements coming out with 2014R2. Some big, some small. I think the biggest change is going to be around Alarm and Event storage. We are transitioning away from the SQL Server realational DB. Instead A&E will not be stored with history blocks. I don’t know if they will be in the same block as process data but the model is still the same. According to Elliot and Rob you are looking at dramatic performance improvements. This also means it’s now much easier to archive. I don’t know about you but I’ve always found the WWALMDB archiving tool to be less than useful. There are some quirky things though about this model that people will struggle with. First, the A&& data will only be available via ODATA, not SQL. At some point I’m assuming they have to build a SQL connector (like for history data) but it’s not in the product now. I think this will keep a lot of people away for now, which is a shame.
Second, a more subtle but interesting is the collapsing of Field Attributes and UDA’s. Apparently having two ways to create attributes was too confusing for people. I actually liked it but I also had a pretty clear vision for exactly why I would use one over the other. I think most user’s weren’t necessarily that advanced so this is a move to help them out. At the end of the day I don’t see this as a big issue.
On the operations management front, i.e. MES, InBatch, etc. there are big things afoot. The first thing you’ll start noticing is EVERYTHING is going to ultramodern responsive WEB UI’s. I know in the past when you thought web UI you thought ugghhh, slow and clunky. I dare say these days web UI’s are typically far suprerior to the typical desktop experience. It all started with Recipe Manager plus and is continuing with MES. I would love to see InBatch go this route also. Having used InBatch for this first time all I think when I open the UI is wow.. hello 1998. Even if you don’t use these two products you should do yourself a favor and at least check out the documentation so we can see the direction everything is going. I also have to admit a little something. When I got RMP i peaked under the hood with the Fiddler software. If you don’t know what Fiddler is, it lets you spy on HTTP traffic between your application or browser and the server. If you are so inclined to do this take a look. Recipe Manager Plus is just moving some recipe data.. but the structures in place already are very intriguing. It’s obvious this is a foundation for a massive shift towards REST API’s and everything HTTP in the very near future. I am very excited.
Another topic we spent a lot of time discussing with Open Source. I, along with another peer in the industry, have started the site www.aaopensource.org. I won’t spend too much time here discussing it. The short version is that we are extended the work I started here on the Archestranaut. Open source tools for System Platform by engineers for engineers. Take a look and please do join effort.
Finally, I got to sit in on a Voice of the Customer session. We got to review some upcoming tech and discuss our needs as customers. It was really exciting. All I will say is be on the look out for more great things from System Platform in the future. And I’m not talking about little things like combing UDA’s and Field Attributes.
Take care and I’ll try to not be such a stranger in the future
-Andy
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