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From the shop floor to the top floor, OPC is the preferred communication standard for sharing process control data at all levels of the enterprise. But as OPC pours into mainstream acceptance, integrators are finding configurations where OPC can be a hindrance to the panacea of plug-and-play application interconnectivity. The most common situation occurs when applications on different Windows domains must communicate with each other. Still, other designs call for the use of low-bandwidth or unreliable networks. It is in these setups that OPC can make use of new "tunneling" technology, which eliminates the biggest OPC headache for integrators: setting up DCOM.
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