If you missed the Ignition Community Conference (ICC) last week, you missed a great one! Vertech was well represented from all three of our offices, and we all enjoyed hearing how others are using Ignition, watching the Travis vs. Kevin buildathon (#TeamTravis), and enjoying some after hours refreshment at the Fat Rabbit Public House. Chris McLaughlin's presentation giving tips for successful MES implementations was very well received. Most of all we were excited to learn about the new features in the long-awaited Ignition 8.0 release and the new Perspective visualization module. Here are four new features we think topped the list this year:
Hands down, the biggest announcement this year is the Perspective vision module. This module was strongly hinted at last year, and the beta release was announced at this year’s show. This module is a fully web-based, responsive SCADA visualization client that will run in any HTML5 browser. Inductive did a great job with the development environment including several different screen creation templates. We think this module will be a game changer allowing the creation of truly mobile applications with access to mobile resources like cameras and GPS. Learn more about Perspective on Inductive’s site.
Integration with source control solutions is now possible with Ignition 8.0! Project configuration information will now be stored in a file structure rather than just in a SQL database. This allows integration with version management software like git. This is a great advantage during application development, but also in the ongoing improvement and modification of in-production SCADA systems.
The tag structure for Ignition 8.0 is much more flexible than with previous versions of Ignition. The new structure uses JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) which allows for singular edits and faster tag reads, writes, and edits. The new structure also allows binding to individual elements or properties of tags, obsoletes the use of cell update bindings, and allows for python script binding and other new binding styles. The IDE also provides some cool new tools for testing tag values before committing changes to a binding or script.
Ignition 8.0 is now compliant with Federated Identity Management for user security. This means it will now support multi-factor authentication and single sign-on capability using enterprise FIM software such as OAuth and OpenID. The gateway control utility and default username and password have been removed in favor of preventing unwanted access into production systems. In the ongoing battle to keep SCADA systems secure, this is a huge step forward.
Click here for more detailed information about Ignition 8.0 and the Perspective module.
Click here to see how Vertech can help you make the most of this powerful SCADA and MES software.