OPC Foundation’s European Interoperability Workshop 2008 is happening this week in Nürnberg, Germany and runs from 1:00 PM on Monday, October 6th through Noon on Friday, October 10th. If you’re not there, looks like you missed the last one for this year. I’ll just assume as a committed OPC vendor you’ve attended either the North American IOP last April or the Japanese IOP at Tokyo in June.
If not, you’ve missed out on the opportunity to validate your products and correct any interoperability problems. Users get to validate Data Access (V1, V2 and V3) interoperability, XML-DA, Alarms and Events and Historical Data Access. In order for a DA Client to qualify to use the new 'Self-Tested' logo, the product must be tested at an Interoperability Workshop with other DA Servers and it must pass a supervised test with the OPC Analyzer. The interoperability workshops are the main venue where clients are tested with the Analyzer, so this is your chance to qualify for the new logo.
If your member company is there, you can follow the testing results on-line. I can see that our man-on-the-street, Curtis, is running the MatrikonOPC Desktop Historian and the OPC Security Gateway through the paces against Servers from Cyberlogic, Siemens, Wonderware and Kongsberg Marine. And of course the OPC Foundation compliance and testing tools too. The list of companies testing Clients against the MatrikonOPC servers is even longer. J Is your company there? How is their testing going?
If for some unavoidable reason you missed all three IOP events this year, don’t despair there are more events lining up for 2009, including more chances to validate OPC UA products.
It is also possible to have the OPC Foundation Compliance tests run via a remote connection which allows the tests to be performed outside of the Interoperability Workshop. There is a fee for this service and you can get more information by contacting the OPC Foundation at LabRequest_AT_opcfoundation.org.