The following are the system requirements for FactoryTalk View SE version 8.20.00 (CPR 9 SR 8).

The hardware and software you use with FactoryTalk View Site Edition depends on the demands an application places on the system. The greater the demand, the more powerful a system you need.

For large or complex applications you should use computers with faster CPUs and more RAM. In any application, faster CPUs and more RAM will result in better performance.

In addition, there should always be sufficient disk space to provide virtual memory that is at least twice the size of the physical RAM.

FactoryTalk View Site Edition is tested and supported on the operating systems installed from original Microsoft media only. For the latest information regarding software platform support, refer to http://www.rockwellautomation.com/compatibility/#/scenarios.

Supported operating systems

• Windows Server 2012 Datacenter (64-bit)
• Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter (64-bit)
• Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard Edition (64-bit)
• Windows Server 2012 Standard Edition (64-bit)
• Windows 8.1 Enterprise Edition (32-bit or 64-bit)
• Windows 8.1 Professional (32-bit or 64-bit)
• Windows 8 Professional (32-bit or 64-bit)
• Windows 8 Enterprise Edition (32-bit or 64-bit)
• Windows 7 Ultimate with Service Pack 1 (64-bit)
• Windows 7 Enterprise with Service Pack 1 (32-bit or 64-bit)
• Windows 7 Professional with Service Pack 1 (32-bit or 64-bit)
• Windows 7 Professional (32-bit or 64-bit)
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition (64-bit)
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition with Service Pack 1 (64-bit)
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition with Service Pack 1 (64-bit)
• Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition with Service Pack 2

Hardware requirements for operator workstations

For computers hosting FactoryTalk View SE Clients in a network application, or for a FactoryTalk View SE Client running a local station application:

• Recommended: Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.66 GHz or higher, and 2 GB RAM or more
• Minimum: Intel Pentium 4,2GHz or higher, 1GB RAM or more

Hardware requirements for engineering workstations

For computers hosting FactoryTalk View Studio in a network application:

• Recommended: Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.66 GHz or higher, and 2 GB RAM or more
• Minimum: Intel Pentium 4, 2GHz or higher, 1GB RAM or more

Hardware requirements for application servers

For computers hosting FactoryTalk View SE HMI Server, FactoryTalk Alarms and Events Tag Server, or RSLinx Enterprise in a network application:

• Recommended: Quad core Intel Xeon, 2.33 GHz or higher, 4 GB RAM
• Minimum: Intel Pentium 4, dual CPU, 3GHz or higher, 2GB RAM or more

Security requirements

For information on the security considerations when using Rockwell Automation products, including

• File extensions created by Rockwell Automation software, firewall rules, and service dependences, see Rockwell Automation Knowledgebase Answer ID 609492.
• TCP/UDP ports used by Rockwell Automation products, see Rockwell Automation Knowledgebase Answer ID 29402.

FactoryTalk View SE version 8.20.00 includes the following enhancements:

• Design-time language switch
  If an application is designed with multiple languages, you can switch application languages at design time to check the layout of translated text.

• Design-time graphic object visibility
  You can use the Object Explorer to show or hide objects on a graphic display at design time.

• Logarithmic trending
  When setting up pens for a trend, you can configure whether to show the chart with the logarithm scale to base 10. This option only works for standard chart style.

• Datalog model data exporting support
  When setting run-time options for a trend, you can configure whether to allow operators to export the data log model data into a CSV file. When exported, each data log model is saved into one CSV file.

• Custom on-screen keypad caption
  You can configure the caption text that appears on the on-screen keypad at run time for a numeric input or string input object.

The following list identifies the anomalies corrected in FactoryTalk View SE version 8.20.00.

• FactoryTalk View fails to properly parameter pass tags to TrendX. If it matches the beginning portion of a parameter, it will replace the matched portion and append the rest of the parameter number at the end. (358711)
• Polygon Global Objects used to draw pipes may not hold position on the display. This occurs when you use Polygon Global Objects for drawing horizontal and vertical pipes and these Global Objects are placed on a graphic display with the LinkSize property set to False. Then you adjust the length of the pipes on a graphic display to obtain the best alignment of the objects, and save and close the display. After that, when you reopen the display, the pipes will not retain the desired position on the display. (358712)
• Under some conditions, the Multistate Indicator does not display the images assigned to some of the states of the object. Instead, it displays a blue rectangle with a white X (known as the Blue X issue). The symbol is what the object displays if it could not find the Image object for that state. (358956)
• Datalog information is being logged to a SQL Database through ODBC. When the ODBC becomes unavailable and the buffer time expires, it does not resume logging to the ODBC even though it is available. It does not seem to check if the ODBC is available until one cycle of the SwitchBack time expires as well. (359142)
• After you copy and paste the global objects of wedge and polygon one by one in to a display and then save the display, when reopening the same display, the global object of wedge on the display shifts up by approximately 10 pixels. (356689)
• After disabling a button using the Disable tab on the object, the button is enabled again after closing and reopening the display if it uses an HMI tag reference in the Action tab. (359718)
• When using an SE button object to call a display and pass the /t parameters or string literals, the string literals are passed in all CAPS regardless of what is entered in the string literal entry. (359719)
• When the HMI Tag Alarm Log Viewer is opened, it shows the previous day's alarms by default. (357029)
• FactoryTalk View Studio stops working and crashes if using invoke command to load TrendX template. (357266)
• The session of FactoryTalk View SE Client may time out when you run a graphic that utilizes CurrentUserHasGroup() to control the visibility of objects for an extended period of time. It works initially but after an indeterminate period of time, it appears to be disconnected and every object reports "Unable to get current user's group name.: CurrentUserHasGroup("groupname")". (360360)
• The AlmG_ShelvedAlarmsExist function ignores Normal, Acknowledged, Shelved alarms for the first running. It works correctly after the alarm is triggered to InAlarm and changed back to Normal, Acknowledged, Shelved. (360085)

The following list identifies the known anomalies or limitations of FactoryTalk View SE version 8.20.00 at the time of the release.

Commands

• If RSLogix 5000 software version 20 is installed on the computer, RSLogix 5000 software is not opened through the OpenRSLogix5000 command line and the following error message opens:
  RSLogix 5000 is not installed.
  Workaround:
  If you do not have to specifically use RSLogix 5000 software version 20, you can avoid this issue by installing an earlier version of RSLogix 5000 software:
  If only version 20 of RSLogix 5000 software is installed on the computer, then uninstall RSLogix 5000 software version 20 and install RSLogix 5000 software version 19.
  If there are multiple versions of RSLogix 5000 software installed on the computer, uninstall all of them and then reinstall all the versions of RSLogix 5000 software that were previously installed on the computer, except version 20. (273840)

Display client

• When opening multiple SE display clients on the same computer with 64-bit Windows 8.1, Windows 8, or Windows 7 SP1, make sure to start each client by the same method. Otherwise, HMI alarms may not show correctly. For example, if you start a client by clicking or double-clicking the FactoryTalk View Site Edition Client icon, start the other clients by the same method too. If you start a client with Run as administrator, start the other clients with Run as administrator too. (347381)
• When Alarm and Log Viewer is opened from the SE Client but cannot get events from the SQL Server database, the SE Client does not response for a few minutes. To resolve this issue, in the toolbar of Alarm and Event Log Viewer, click Stop to stop reading events from the database. (344892)

Distributed Application Manager

• Timeout may occur when you perform backup or restore operation through an unstable or slow network. To resolve this issue, open the Registry Editor of the computer that runs the tool, update the registry key CompressTimeout to a larger value than 1200 and try again. The key is in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Rockwell Software\RSView Enterprise\DistributeApplicationManager\Settings. (355276)
• During the restore operation, when overwriting a running HMI server, some components of the HMI server may still exist in the HMI folder after you restart the computer. This happens when the names of these components do not exist in the archived HMI file. (354220)
• The restore operation may fail when you overwrite an application that is open or in use. The following error shows:
  Restored Failed! 0x80009006
  To resolve this issue, follow the steps below:
  1. In FactoryTalk Administration Console, delete the RSLinx Enterprise server.
  2. In FactoryTalk Administration Console, delete the Tag Alarm and Event server.
  3. Close FactoryTalk Administration Console and FactoryTalk View Studio.
  4. In Application Manager, delete the application.
  5. After the application is deleted successfully, try to restore the application again.  (352245)     

Find and Replace

• In the SE Network Distributed applications, if the HMI server at the root node has the same name as the application when using the Find and Replace feature, the search results might include the application name even though you performed the search at the HMI server level. (275936)
• There is the possibility that some object properties that are configured in character sets for east Asian languages such as Chinese or Japanese, will display a question mark in the result list when you use the Find and Replace, Cross Reference or Undo feature.
  Workaround: Go to Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options, and select the appropriate language to match the language version desired. (338894)

Graphic Displays

• Applying color animations to an object group as well as to the individual objects in the group causes unexpected behaviors. To set up color animations for an object group, either apply the color animations to the group, or to the individual objects in the group. (346758)
• When changing the font style of a Text object by using the browse (…) button in the Text Properties window, FactoryTalk View Studio crashes. To change the font style, select the style from the Font list. (347930)

Graphic objects

• When registering or unregistering an ActiveX Control object in FactoryTalk View Studio with UAC (User Account Control) enabled on the operating system, an error message shows. To successfully register or unregister an ActiveX Control object, before the operation, do one of the following:
  Turn off UAC and restart the computer
  Run FactoryTalk View Studio as administrator (346124)

• If the expression setting for the animation property of the base object is empty when you change the LinkAnimation property of a reference object to Link without expressions and change the expression setting for the animation property, the expression setting change cannot be saved.
  Workaround:
  To avoid this issue, fill in a valid value in the expression setting for the animation property of the base object first. (272937)

• If you copy and paste a PNG image into an application, the image might appear blurred. To avoid this issue, import the image into the Image folder first, and then insert the image into the application from the Image folder. (337726)

• When setting string display properties on a desktop running Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012, or Windows Server 2012 with the default theme, the Bold, Italic, and Underline styles do not display as expected, which makes it difficult to tell whether the font style is selected or not. To resolve the issue on Windows 7, use Windows 7 classic theme settings. (275602)

Installation

• If SoftLogix5800 is running on the computer and users want to upgrade RSLinx Classic, an extra message displays that reminds users to reboot the computer to finish the upgrade. This reminder message will not display if you shut down SoftLogix5800 before the upgrade. (275940)
• If you have mapped IP addresses to host names in the C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file, please update the host file once the IP addresses or host names are changed. Otherwise, the invalid mapping could stop IIS from being installed. (338385)
• Installing FactoryTalk SE is not supported on a debug version of any operating system. (338575)
• Make sure to select the Client Install Portal check box at the first time if you plan to use this feature. Otherwise, you will not be able to add and install it in the Program Maintenance mode. (346940)
• Upgrading FactoryTalk View from version 8.00 or 8.10 to version 8.20 results in removal of the Arial Bold font from the operating system. See Answer ID 791573 . (361115)

Operating systems

• If IPv6 is not supported or is disabled in your network environment, when you use FactoryTalk View Studio on Windows 8.1, Windows 8, Windows Server 2012 R2, or Windows Server 2012, the network communication performance may be slow. To resolve this issue, you may need to disable IPv6 on your computer or enable IPv6 in your network environment. Contact your IT department for details. (347310)
• When exporting application files, such as graphic displays, you may not be able to access the destination folder. This may be due to User Account Control (UAC) turned on in the Windows. For more details, see Windows Help. (264554)
• If your system is experiencing HMI tag failures and wireframing, you may have a port conflict. Check the event log for the message: "Unable to establish connection with Live Data using TCP/IP protocol. Port may be in use by another process." The HMI tag failures could occur on any operating system but due to dynamic port range changes, this issue could occur more often on Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008. To resolve this, you will need to manually change the port. See Answer ID 61064 in the Rockwell Automation Knowledgebase for additional information on how to do this. (264248)
• If you try to run your client file by double clicking the .cli file,  the title bar may not show the full client file name. If you run your client file by selecting Start > Programs > Rockwell Software > FactoryTalk View > FactoryTalk View Site Edition Client > [client configuration (.cli) file] > Run, then the title bar will display the full client name. (262995)
• The internal alarm bell does not sound when an HMI tag alarm is triggered on the FactoryTalk View Site Edition server computer if the server computer is running on Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7 Professional. (262746)

Software components

• FactoryTalk Diagnostics cannot log to a remote database using Microsoft Access. You can only log to a local database using Microsoft Access. (263208)

• If you rename an HMI server while you are deploying an application, you may need to restart the computer in order to have the HMI tags show up in the Tag Browser.

• Updating to the new KEPServer Enterprise version, V5.7, may require updating the OPC Data Server configuration after a restoring an application file. On the OPC Data Server configuration tab, update the computer name then restart the computer before browsing for the new Prog ID for KEPServer Enterprise. (276028)

• During the uninstallation and modification of RSLinx Classic 2.43, users need to browse to the source location of the installation package. If the installation package has been removed from the source location, the users will not be able to browse to the right location. This issue only exists in RSLinx Classic 2.43. (276109)

ODBC databases

• Creating tables for Float and String data logging to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 may fail. To resolve this issue, you should update to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1, or later, and create the tables using the new instance.
• Microsoft SQL Server memory usage continues to increase until there is a memory leak as users perform find, replace, cross reference, and other data access operations. To avoid this memory leak issue, when installing SQL Server with FactoryTalk View products, the max server memory property for SQL Server is automatically configured to 500M. See Answer ID 515779 in the Rockwell Automation Knowledgebase for more information. (275064/338937)
• If a FactoryTalk View SE datalog becomes disconnected from a remote ODBC database and then eventually becomes reconnected, it fails to continue logging data to the ODBC database.
  Workaround:
  1. In the datalog configuration, specify a backup ODBC database. If a disconnection occurs to the primary ODBC database, the logging of data will now continue to the backup ODBC database.
  2. The connection to the primary ODBC database has recovered and you do not have a backup ODBC database configured. To make the datalog resume logging to the primary ODBC database, issue the command Datalogoff <name of datalog> and then the command Datalogon <name of datalog>.
  See Answer ID 747699 in the Rockwell Automation Knowledgebase for additional information. (359289)

Tag Server

• During replication, you may fail to replicate project information to some secondary servers. To resolve this issue, restart these secondary servers and replicate again. If the replication still fails, cancel the redundancy configuration and delete HMI project from secondary servers, restart secondary servers, and configure the redundancy again. (347733)
• If you configure NIC speed remotely, to Auto, (rather than to 100 Mb Full), it doubles the amount of time to open the tag editor. To avoid this problem, we recommend that you configure NIC speed to the highest value possible. (270579)

Tools and utilities

• All Windows hot keys are disabled in the DeskLock utility except the Windows Logo + L combination, which still locks the Windows Desktop. This is found in the Windows 7 Professional and Windows 2008 operating systems. (66182)
• You are recommended to close the running project while importing a tag CSV file containing large amounts of tags and alarms. Otherwise, you will need to wait a few minutes and the Server Busy Dialog box may pop up. (271868)

Trend objects

• If FactoryTalk View uses RSLinx Enterprise as the communication server, the trend object cannot display historical values of SINT tags.
  Workaround:
  Create an HMI tag that points to the SINT tag, and then display the historical value of this HMI tag in the trend.
  Change the data type of the SINT tag to INT, DINT, or REAL. (266629)
• The trend object cannot get the oldest data from FactoryTalk Historian server when you click the Oldest Data button. (340866)
• Timeout may occur when you try to load large amounts of data points from an ODBC data source such as SQL Server, and the trend object does not show the historical data. To resolve this issue, open the Registry Editor, update the key DatalogOdbcDbTimeout to a larger value in the following two locations, and try again: (343026)
  HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Rockwell Software\RSView Enterprise\Data Log
  HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-18\Software\Rockwell Software\RSView Enterprise\Data Log

Important changes for FactoryTalk ViewPoint for Site Edition version 8.20

The following important changes apply only to features available in FactoryTalk ViewPoint for Site Edition.

Alarms

• When an alarm object is drawn small or scaled to a small device, only the message and priority columns are displayed. Selecting an alarm will show its complete details. The smallest size the alarm object will draw or scale down to is 250x250 pixels. [TFS 62410]
• The alarm object will always be drawn completely, even if it "hangs off" the end of an On Top display. [TFS 60631]
• At runtime, the alarm object will be brought to the foreground of the display, so any objects that are drawn over an alarm object will be covered or hidden.