Author: Tom Jordan

Marketing Lead for ThinManager - A Rockwell Automation Technology

Monthly Integrator Spotlight

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Stacking up the Benefits:  ThinManager and Rockwell Automation

For nearly thirty years, ESE, Inc, the Engineering Solutions Experts, has seen continuous growth in plant automation engineering.  Headquartered in Marshfield, Wisconsin, ESE specializes in Rockwell solutions for global food and beverage manufacturers. Yet, after years of providing support and upgrades, it became apparent that there was a missing piece to the puzzle.  That piece turned out to be ThinManager.

Contacted by a major cheese processing plant in California, ESE was brought in to upgrade their existing processes with a combination of modern hardware and a Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk View SE distributed SCADA system.  They replaced the older PanelView terminals that were on the factory floor with Allen-Bradley 200R VersaView Industrial PCs, as well as a legacy RSView32 SCADA system to give them more computing power and greater flexibility. [...]

MailBag Friday (#14)

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Every Friday, we dedicate this space to sharing solutions for some of the most frequently asked questions posed to our ThinManager Technical Support team.  This weekly feature will help educate ThinManager users and provide them with answers to questions they may have about licenses, installation, integration, deployment, upgrades, maintenance, and daily operation.  Great technical support is an essential part of the ThinManager platform, and we are constantly striving to make your environment as productive and efficient as possible. [...]

ThinManager Q & A

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Managing a Municipality

We recently sat down with Ken Osborne, the SCADA Systems Coordinator for Pinellas County Utilities and discussed what it takes to keep the water flowing for over one million people in the Tampa Bay area.

Q –  “How long have you been with the Pinellas County Utilities?”

A –  “Thirty three years”

Q –  “What did the system look like 33 years ago?”

A –  “There wasn’t a system. In about 1995, we installed a VMS based Opto 22 system for all of Pinellas County, which at the time, was four main facilities plus 300 pumps and offsite stations. After Y2K happened, when we saw that our software was not working properly, we started converting over to Wonderware and we completed our first site deployment with ThinManager on an upgrade to a Terminal Server environment with Wonderware.” [...]

Stacking up the Benefits: Download ThinManager and Rockwell Automation

Tom Jordan

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For nearly thirty years, ESE, Inc, the Engineering Solutions Experts, has seen continuous growth in plant automation engineering. Headquartered in Marshfield, Wisconsin, ESE specializes in Rockwell solutions for global food and beverage manufacturers. Yet, after years of providing support and upgrades, it became apparent that there was a missing piece to the puzzle. That piece turned out to be ThinManager.

Contacted by a major cheese processing plant in California, ESE was brought in to upgrade their existing processes with a combination of modern hardware and a Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk View SE distributed SCADA system. They replaced the older PanelView terminals as well as a legacy RSView32 SCADA system that were on the factory floor with Allen-Bradley 200R VersaView Industrial PCs to give them more computing power and greater flexibility. [...]

Where is the Real Return on Thin Client Investment?

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Everything you read about thin clients, zero clients, or anything other than a PC will tell you there is a device that is better and saves you more money compared to their competition.  More often than not, these claims are validated by a report paid for by a hardware manufacturer that only talks about their specific client matched up against another client chosen as comparative fodder because they know they can beat it.  These reports are not false, nor are they inaccurate.  They are, however, slanted to omit where the savings really are to paint a far prettier picture.  After all, their first, last, and only reason for commissioning such a report is to sell you their newest hardware release. [...]

ThinManager 6.0 Service Pack 1 Release Notes

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ThinManager 6.0 SP1 Release Notes:

ThinManager build 6002:

-Delete workstation nodes before restoring configuration.

ThinServer build 6003:

-Fix module installation on synced ThinServers.

-PXE server was not correctly stopped/started after restoring configuration.

-Fixed sync of packages that did not exist on both ThinServers.

-Restart tftp thread after restoring configuration when necessary.

-Fix disable of Terminal Server when using DNS.

-Changed queuing to better accommodate Delta V users licensing requirements.

-Fixed installation of firmware from synchronized slave. [...]

MailBag Friday (#13)

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Every Friday, we dedicate this space to sharing solutions for some of the most frequently asked questions posed to our ThinManager Technical Support team.  This weekly feature will help educate ThinManager users and provide them with answers to questions they may have about licenses, installation, integration, deployment, upgrades, maintenance, and daily operation.  Great technical support is an essential part of the ThinManager platform, and we are constantly striving to make your environment as productive and efficient as possible. [...]

Virtualization in an Industrial Environment (Part 3)

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This is the third and final part of our three part series focusing on the entire process of Virtualizing in an industrial environment.  While there is a lot of talk about Virtualizing and VDI, we wanted to focus on the viability and deployment of Virtualization in an industrial and manufacturing environment which would speak to the concerns and difficulties specific to this industry.

Part 3: Managing Your Environments?

 

In Part 2 of this series, we discussed whether or not Virtualization is necessary once you’ve centralized, and, if it is, how far do you go. For most System Administrators,  RDS is the easiest and most cost effective place to begin.  The need to only install OS’s and applications once, and having them deploy to multiple clients, can provide enough time savings and reduced administrative headaches that Virtualization could very well just be an added cost to a system that already does everything the end user requires. [...]

Old School For New Technology

Tom Jordan

Jordan Engineering Builds a ThinManager Thin Client Solution “One Brick at a Time” for Canadian Precious Metals Company

There just aren’t many companies that run their businesses on old school principles. Regular face time with customers, doing a job right the first time, and giving back to the people around them are just a few. Jordan Engineering does all this and more. Giving indeed seems to be the secret ingredient for this integration company’s success.

CEO and founder, Sandra Murre has always worked hard to build success. Sandra and Jordan Engineering share that success with their employees, their customers and the world around them. The profits from the business get split into thirds; one third is returned to the employees through profit-sharing, one third goes back into the business to improve customer service, fund growth and business performance and yet another third goes to charity. [...]

MailBag Friday (#12)

Tom Jordan

Every Friday, we dedicate this space to sharing solutions for some of the most frequently asked questions posed to our ThinManager Technical Support team.  This weekly feature will help educate ThinManager users and provide them with answers to questions they may have about licenses, installation, integration, deployment, upgrades, maintenance, and daily operation.  Great technical support is an essential part of the ThinManager platform, and we are constantly striving to make your environment as productive and efficient as possible. [...]