Rhys

How about a section on how other products stack up to PI? Not a forum dedicated to those products but more what are some of the relative advantages/disadvantages vis-à-vis PI...

Doug

RJK Solutions, RapidPI.

Just as a quick starter - I'm in the process of converting a number of Aspen Infoplus.21 based systems over to PI.

Aspen Good Points:
Full integrated security with the windows domain
Multiple parallel history repositories
Trending and Graphics Tool provided lots of out of the box utilities that were user friendly (export to excel, add/temove tags at runtime mode, make tags on trend visible/invisible at touch of radio button on the trend, change scale from the tag box, trend formatting user changable in runtime mode)
The ability to create your own tag structures

Aspen Not so good points:
System Admin Tools were done via SQL scripting language no prebuilt tools
Batch Plots and Tool was difficult to use
No built in calculation engine, these had to be done within SQL script or purchasing the calculation module 'AspenCalc'
Field lengths in default record structures were very small meaning much work was needed to mimise descriptions, tag names

In comparision PI wins hands down from a System management point of view.

Downsides of PI are from a user perspective in that out of the box processbook isn't particularly user friendly and requires customising with VBA to address this. Whilst not an issue for me, when the average plant operator compares the built in trend functionality from a PI ProcessBook trend to that of an Aspen Process Explorer trend the Aspen variant wins everytime and we have to address this imbalance with VBA scripting. Whilst OSI is starting to bridge the gap some of the functionality like the 'copy trend and paste into excel to get the raw data into a worksheet' have been around since at least 2000 when I first started using IP.21.

The other downside in PI client tools is DataLink, yes it is powerful but there's a lot in there - this scares users off.

However BatchView is great and so much better than what Aspen were offering.

The other winning point for PI is that everything can be done within it's own database, for Aspen we had to use MS SQL Server or Oracle to hold both a Batch Database and a seperate Alarm and Event DataBase, meaning greater admin overheads.

So all in all from an end user perspective the out of the box client trending/graphic tool from Aspen beats OSI's offering (the majority of this can be addressed), but administration wise and Interface configuration wise OSI leaves the Aspen offering standing.