Bringing a whole new meaning to “State-Of-The-Art”

For more than a decade, ThinManager by ACP has been helping companies and municipalities manage State-Of-The-Art automated facilities across the globe.  Chances are that every day, you buy or use a product or service that ThinManager has helped deliver to you.

Over the years, our ever-expanding customer base has become the impetus for more ThinManager training and education offerings.  From our Roadshow which comes to your hometown to deliver product knowledge to your front door, to our large product launch events, we have always looked for new and better ways to make sure that you get the most out of your ThinManager based thin client systems. [...]

The Greatest ROI Comes From the Money You Don’t Have to Spend

Last month, we discussed how the often used “Return on Investment” statistic is one that is skewed by the data that is or is not used to determine initial cash layout of a proposed deployment.  However, one important part of that equation that has always been unavoidable when pricing out a proposed deployment is hardware.  When thin clients were first introduced, their initial cost savings over PCs was obvious.  But over the last decade, PC prices have continued to drop while thin client prices have, for the most part, stayed the same.  A quick review of new product press releases this month from manufacturers such as AIS, HP, Acer, and Ncomputing shows that while some thin clients can still be purchased at a very manageable price point, most of the current models on the market can cost up to $700 per unit. [...]

MailBag Friday (#17)

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. [...]

MailBag Friday (#16)

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. [...]

The Benefits of Shadowing Clients

Here at ACP, we have been working tirelessly to discuss and promote the important distinctions between ThinManager and the competition.   The most prevalent of those distinctions is that while other centralized management solutions manage the server, ThinManager manages the clients as well as their connections to the server.  A prime example of this is the Shadowing feature, which is perhaps the most used ThinManager function by customers as well as integrators.

Shadowing is a function that allows an authorized user to view what is running on a remote client from anywhere using a number of methods with just one simple mouse click or keystroke.  For most system engineers, using Shadowing from their Control Room is the most common usage, as well as being simple and convenient to deploy.  This useful feature greatly reduces the time between an operator reporting a problem and an administrator being able to review the current session.   Now an engineer or administrator can simply view the individual session currently running at any client in the facility without having to leave the Control Room.  With Shadowing, it now takes minutes to review a problem client or session instead of hours. [...]

MailBag Friday (#15)

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. [...]

Monthly Integrator Spotlight

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)

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

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

pdfdownload

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. [...]