Raesemann Enterprises joins the OSIsoft vCampus

I just finished participating in the OSIsoft vCampus Introductory Webinar. The OSIsoft vCampus is a new community designed to assist developers in developing applications around PI. This is a fantastic initiative in my opinion.

I have been working with PI for about 12 years. In the beginning there was the PI server, DataLink, and ProcessBook. It was pretty easy to sit down and get started. As the product mix grew I ran into the problem that it was not easy to get my hands on the new products and test them out. Once I became a consultant it was even worse because I was not a customer and there was no way to establish a formal relationship with OSIsoft.

I joined the OSIsoft Partner Program last year and was able for the first time as a consultant to establish a formal relationship with OSIsoft and get my hands on all of their products. In the past I had to wait until one of my customers purchased a product in order to get the opportunity to play with it and learn to use it. The Partner Program allowed me for the first time to test products and work on demo applications for everything that OSIsoft produced. This was good for me and I’m sure that it was ultimately good for them.

This year they are taking the concept one step further and introducing vCampus. The site offers a reference library containing all of the product documentation in one easy location. More importantly, they are adding white papers and field notes to help with common problems and to share best practices. The site offers discussion forums with direct OSIsoft developer participation and Blogs produced by developers and product managers.

The vCampus subscription provides me with a developer license for all of OSIsoft’s products. This is a tremendous asset as I am able to get up to speed on new technologies and experiment with new concepts. The site offers a DVD image download containing all of up to date products. New images will be released frequently. Ultimately a Microsoft Updates type of service is planned. The licensing is pretty robust and allows the developer to build up to a 3 server collective in order to test HA configurations and also test applications against HA.

Finally the vCampus allows developers access to the PI SDK and AF SDK. A couple of years ago OSIsoft announced that they would curtail access to the SDK’s. They later decided that they needed to provide access to the SDK’s in order to encourage development around PI but they also needed to maintain the quality of applications and prevent developers from creating poorly constructed programs that might cause problems.

It looks like OSIsoft has devoted 3 full time people to vCampus. This should help to insure that the initiative gets the traction that it needs to really take off. 

You can checkout vCampus and join at :http://vCampus.OSIsoft.com