On this project, Nimble designed and developed a freeware application, the Email Notification Manager (ENM), which allows a user(s) to receive email whenever an OSISoft PI historian logs certain process events.
Here are the highlights:
- ENM has two modes: configuration and monitoring
- In configuration mode, the user fills in a grid with records that get stored into the ENM tag database, consisting of:
- Tag name (must be digital)
- Trigger state (True or False)
- List of email addresses to be notified
- In monitoring mode:
- ENM imports the tag database
- Searches the data acquisition system once each second for state changes
- Determines if there has been a transition into the Trigger state for each tag in ENM (last pass = no, this pass = yes)
- If yes, generates an email message to all addresses in the database containing a message with the digital tag name, tag state, and time of transition
- Target devices for email include personal computers, paging systems, personal digital assistants (PDA), and most ordinary cell phones with texting capability
- Utilizes the Microsoft Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) standard which ships with Outlook Express, Office Outlook, and Exchange
- Implemented in Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0
- Became the most downloaded freeware appllication by the vendor's user community