The New Product Catalogue

The OPC Foundation Product Catalogue has been re-designed to make it easier for company representatives to maintain their information and to give prominence to products that have been compliance or interoperability tested.

The new product catalogue will be released in two stages. During the first stage the new catalogue search features will be available to everyone; however, information regarding the certification test status for each product will only be visible to company representatives. During this stage it is important that all company representatives review their information in the catalogue to ensure it is correct and up to date. In the second stage, the certification test status will be made available to everyone.

This page discusses the various concepts introduced in the new catalogue and discusses what information company representatives must provide in order to have their products listed as OPC certified.

OPC Certification

This is a new marketing initiative by the OPC Foundation to develop a brand name that will be automatically applied to all products in the catalogue that meet the compliance and interoperability requirements set out by the OPC Foundation. We believe this will be a valuable tool for both end-users looking for products that provide the best OPC compatibility and for vendors who wish to publicize the fact that they participate in the OPC Foundation certification test process.

The new product catalogue gives the highest visibility to OPC Certified Products.

Certification Test Status

Each product in the catalogue has a certification test status which may have one of the following values:

Tested - The product has passed all certification tests required for the all specifications that it supports. This implies that OPC server products have passed the compliance tests and that OPC client products have been tested at the interoperability workshops. Products which are both an OPC client and an OPC server must pass the compliance test and be tested at the interoperability workshops.

Products with a certification test status of 'Tested' are labeled as 'OPC Certified'.

Partially Tested - The product has passed the certification tests required for some of specifications that it supports. This status typically applies to products that support multiple specifications but have only tested some of these specifications. This status could also apply to products which are both a client and a server but have only completed either the interoperability tests or the compliance tests.

Testing In Progress - The product has not passed the certification tests required for the any of the specifications that it supports, however, it is still within the grace period allowed by the OPC product catalogue. Vendors have 6 months to complete compliance testing and 12 months to complete interoperability testing after adding a product to the catalogue. This grace period also applies when a new version of the compliance test tool is released or after the first time a specification is tested at an interoperability workshop.

No Test Defined - The product does not require certification testing since there are no compliance or interoperability tests available for any of the specifications that it supports.

Previously Tested - The product has passed older versions of the certification tests for some of the specifications that it supports and should be re-tested. For compliance test results, products need to be re-tested whenever a new major version of the compliance test tool is released. For interoperability test results, products need to be re-tested whenever a new version of a specification is released or after two years have past.

Untested - The product has not passed the certification tests required for the any of the specifications that it supports.

Certification Procedures

What a vendor must do to obtain OPC Certification depends on the type of product.

For each server product, the vendor must submit compliance test results for each specification that the product supports. Furthermore, it will no longer be possible to submit compliance test results without having an entry in the product catalogue. That said, company representatives are now able to submit the encrypted output (*.enc) of the Compliance test Tool (CTT) directly and no longer need to send it by e-mail and wait for it to be posted to the site.

For each client product, the vendor must test each specification that the product supports at an interoperability workshop. Interoperability results are automatically imported from the IOP Workshop database at the end of each workshop.

Products that are both clients and servers must pass both the compliance tests and interoperability tests according to the specifications that they support. For example, an HDA server that is also DA client application would need to be interoperability tested for DA and compliance tested for HDA.

When a vendor releases a new version of the product they may re-submit test results for the same product. The test results have a field which the vendor may edit to distinguish between results for different product versions. This field is called the Server Name for compliance test results and the Product Name for the interoperability test results.

Development Toolkits

The old product catalog lumped development toolkits with services. The new product catalogue requires that all development toolkits that can be used to create an OPC client or server must be categorized as a client and/or server. To accommodate this requirement, products now have an additional attribute called 'Target User' that distinguishes development toolkits from other products.

Existing development toolkits in the product catalog have been automatically re-classified as a client or server based on the product description. Vendors should review this new classification to ensure that it is correct.

As a consequence of this change, development toolkit products are now eligible for the OPC Certified Product status if the vendor conducts the appropriate compliance and interoperability tests. For example a server toolkit vendor should create a sample server using their tool kit and apply the appropriate compliance tests to it.  A client toolkit vendor should build a sample client and have it Interoperability tested.

Existing Compliance Results

Many of the compliance test results that are available on the website today do not have any associated product in the catalogue.  In order to make these results visible in the new catalogue they have been associated with an auto-generated product called Unassigned CTT Results. Company representatives must review all prior compliance test assigned to this temporary product and associate them with either a new or an existing product in the catalogue.

Existing Interoperability Results

Results from prior interoperability workshops have been imported into the new website; however, some results did not have an associated product in the catalogue. In these cases, the system automatically created new products with the name used at the IOP workshop but marked them as deleted. This means that these products and their interoperability results will not be publicly visible until the company representatives review these products and add appropriate descriptive information.

In some cases, the system may have created multiple products that are really the same product with slightly different names. For this reason, the system allows company representatives to reassign the interoperability results to different products in the catalogue.

Representative Accounts

The new website allows designated representatives to delegate responsibilities for maintaining company information on the OPC website to different individuals within their organizations without granting access to all administrative powers. The website has three privilege levels that can be assigned to a user:

Representative: the user is able to modify all company information including the privileges granted to other users

Marketing Editor: the user able to modify all general marketing information for the company including news releases and company contacts or locations. The user cannot modify product information for submit compliance test results.

Product Editor: the user is only able to modify products in the catalogue including the ability to submit and/or re-assign compliance or interoperability test results.

A representative may modify the privileges granted to users from their company that have already created account by clicking on the 'Users' link from the Representatives Home Page. Click on the e-mail to edit the privileges for a specific user. If a user does not exist in the system a representative will have to ask the person to create an OPC Foundation website account first via this page.

Note that a Marketing Editor is not the same as a Marketing Contact. A Marketing Contact is a person at the company which the OPC Foundation can contact regarding activities like trade shows or similar activities that could require corporate sponsorship. A Marketing Contact does not need to have an account on the OPC Foundation website and cannot modify any of the company information. A Marketing Editor may modify the list of Marketing Contacts for a company.

Accessing the Catalogue Administration Pages

The following link will allow a company representative to login access all of the features of the product catalogue:

http://www.opcfoundation.org/Admin/Representatives.aspx

If you are not able to access this page and you are the designation OPC Foundation representative for you company then please send an e-mail to the administrator.

The following context menu is on the left side of the representatives home page.

Additional optional sub-menus will appear in this menu depending on the context.

If you wish to submit a compliance test you must click on 'Products' and click on the specific product from the list of products. At this point the following menu will appear:

Clicking on the Submit Compliance Result option will bring to a form that allows you to upload the output of the CTT.