Connecting WIN-911 to Intouch 10.1

Greetings!

Our IT Dept. is forcing us to migrate from Wonderware's SCADAlarm to WIN-911. SCADAlarm is not Win7 compliant and since that's the direction we're headed, bye-bye to that product. The WW sales guy mentioned that they are now going to be selling WIN-911, so we bought that product figuring they would have all the know how to make it work. Now the fun begins....

The install of WIN-911 was a piece of cake, but getting the two applications to talk is driving me nuts. The WW app is running on Server 2008, so no DDE is available. SCADAlarm was talking via SuiteLink, but WIN-911 doesn't support that. It appears that OPC would be the best way to go, but I have about zero knowledge of how to make that work. I inherited this system from an integrator who didn't really follow any standardization and provided no documentation when he left.

I have installed and attempted to configure FSGateway, but I'm in uncharted territory. I have chatted a few times with the respective support techs, but they don't seem to know much about the other's product, a scenario I was trying very hard to avoid. I have been able to make some connections, but I'm only seeing system tags ($SYS$Status, etc). I cannot find any of my field data.

Here's the 10,000' view of my system: WW app is running on Server 2008 and is talking to Micrologix 1100s, 1400s, and SLC500s. I'm using DASABCIP, DASABTCP, and DASMBTCP to bring data in from the field. SCADAlarm runs on a separate machine(but on the same network) as will WIN-911.

Any help/ideas/suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I know I can't be the only person trying to do this.

-Jim

Perhaps this document might shed some light on the matter?

http://www.logic-control.com/datasheets/23/Components%20Manual/Intouch%20Direct%20Connect.pdf

A little helpful, but Direct Connect only works when WIN-911 is installed on the same machine that's running the WW application. I've been down that road with support already. I do appreciate the effort, however!

-Jim

BHow's document describes Intouch Direct Connect, which at its heart is communicating with Wonderware through the tags themselves without any futzing around with OPC or DAServers and is 100% the way to go here.

Edit: I did not see that the applications were on separate machines, sorry! I can't say I've ever done such a thing. Is there any way whatsoever you can get them on the same server? It'll save you a lot of heartache...

There's a couple issues that keep me from putting it on the same machine:
1) We're running WW on a virtual machine that is not at my location. The access phone lines and modems are not located at that facility.

2) If the Wonderware server should crash or get rebooted accidentally by IT staff(it's happened), the WIN-911 app would go belly up as well and it wouldn't be able to send out any help alarms.

-Jim

It's possible to make FSGateway act as an OPC server. Install it on the machine running Win911. That machine needs to be able to browse to a shared folder on the WW server to access the Intouch Tag Database. I'm out of the office at the moment so I can't remember exact details, but in FSgateway you then add an Intouch item or something like that, select the Intouch app directory and then select which tags are to be visible. You do need to actually select the tags and see them added to the topic list, this caught me out before. .. Could also only see the system type tags!

Those are pretty rubbish directions, when I'm back behind my desk on Friday I'll do you some screenshots.