North American Interoperability Workshop 2009 - Boca Raton, FL

The OPC Foundation is organizing an OPC Interoperability Workshop in Boca Raton, FL. This workshop will run from
1:00 PM on Monday, March 2, 2009 through Noon on Friday, March 6, 2009.

All OPC Foundation members are once again encouraged to use this upcoming test session as not only a mechanism to validate their products, but to also debug and diagnose any interoperability problems that may be discovered. This year's session will allow up to a maximum qty (60) vendors to validate Data Access (V1, V2 and V3) interoperability, XML-DA, Alarms and Events, Historical Data Access and OPC Unified Architecture.

The purpose of this workshop is to make sure that our OPC products work together. We want to validate interoperability for all required interfaces and functions, as well as validate interoperability for any optional interfaces where practical. We will document interoperability issues that occur for purposes of adding clarity to the OPC specifications. You should plan on helping to debug issues that occur, and be prepared to modify your software components if required. We will be testing primarily for successful operation between clients and servers but will test for failure as time permits. Please plan on attending all days of the workshop if possible.

  Unified Architecture Testing

With the release of commercial OPC UA products, OPC UA testing will now occur as an integral part of the Interoperability Workshop, in the same room side by side with OPC classic (COM) testing.  This will also make it easier to test hybrid applications like the UA Wrappers and Proxies. UA and OPC COM applications will run on the same network, but UA-only machines will not have to be configured for DCOM security.

DA Clients can Qualify for the Self-Tested Logo

In order for a DA Client to qualify to use the '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 will be the only venue clients  are tested with the Analyzer, so this is your chance to qualify for the logo . In order to greatly improve your chances of passing, DA client vendors should download the OPC Analyzer and test your client yourself beforehand.

UA DA COM Wrapper

A beta version of the UA DA COM Wrapper is available for download. No special sessions are planned on this but – if interested – you should try this wrapper before the workshop and use the IOP to exchange your experiences with other participants and the OPC staff on hand.

Registration

Registration (online) for this workshop is now available.

This year participation will cost $495 until February 15, then $595 per person.  The money is used to fund the maintenance/ enhancement of the OPC interop and compliance tools.

If you wish to attend, please go to the Online Registration page to register your contact data and – on a second page - the applications you are going to test. Note that you will be able to add or modify the registered applications anytime before the workshop.

A document is available for download that explains step by step how to register and other features that are available for IOP Workshop participants.

We look forward to your participation.

You will be required to bring a computer (notebooks preferred due to tabletop space limitations). We will provide room and network (100BaseT). See also the more detailed workshop guidelines. If you will be testing an OPC server then you must either provide simulated data or real data acquired from a device.

Facility

OPC Foundation Member ILS Technology in conjunction with Florida Atlantic University will host.

The location of the IOP test facility is:

Forkas Alumni Center Florida Atlantic University 777 Glades Rd. Boca Raton, FL 33431   Campus Map

Hotels

Attendees are responsible for making their own travel and hotel reservations. 

Airports

Airport Transportation

Agenda

Day 1:

We will start with network configuration, followed by DCOM configuration. This will be done step-by-step with on-screen instructions. After successful configuration all PCs participating in COM interop will be part of the domain (does not apply to UA). A "share" partition on the domain server can be used to exchange files if necessary.

Next we will introduce you with the infrastructure and the test procedure:

·         All Servers have to be specified by means of a Web-based entry-form (ProgID, general properties, supported optional interfaces, supported ItemIDs /Conditions …). These data will go into the test database and will be available for the clients as test data.

·         Clients will also use Web-based entry-forms to find available servers, view their properties, select them for testing, fill in test results, etc.

Participants of previous workshops in particular are asked to specify their products online the week before the workshop in order to have more time for testing during the workshop.

Day 2-5:

These three and a half days will be available for general testing. Every client has to perform an IOP test with every server of different vendors. Web-based forms will show the status with respect to available servers and clients.

From past experience we estimate an average of one hour for each test combination.

Each client vendor has to enter the test results for each tested server into the database (web-based again). The database will be available to all participants at the end of the workshop.

Some of us will be available to help resolve general problems (DCOM, network, specification ambiguities …).

The workshop will end by noon Friday.