Feedback for WinCC Unified Comfort.

Just a quick note:

Because of the current shortages / lead times on Comfort panels, I had recently the experience of having to use the "precious gem" called WinCC Unified Comfort.

If you are even remotely considering to used it, let me just tell you one think:

Just don't.

The amount of issues is staggering. It's incomplete, has a ton of bugs, the workflow is about 3x slower, the touch controls are an afterthought that is difficult to use (yes surprise, machine operators use touch controls), there are deployment issues ...

The product is at least 2 years away from a proper release date in my book.

If I had enough time on my hands, I could easily submit about 30 separate bug reports just based on this single experience. Probably not enough patience for that (seeing the results of my previous attempts), but I might at least do a similar kind of write-up on this topic in the future. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Split from TIA Portal bugs / Usability issues - will they ever fix this?.

baioretto

Just a quick note:

Because of the current shortages / lead times on Comfort panels, I had recently the experience of having to use the "precious gem" called WinCC Unified Comfort.

If you are even remotely considering to used it, let me just tell you one think:

Just don't.

The amount of issues is staggering. It's incomplete, has a ton of bugs, the workflow is about 3x slower, the touch controls are an afterthought that is difficult to use (yes surprise, machine operators use touch controls), there are deployment issues ...

May you be a little bit more specific ? So I have some ammunition to feed our company's management ??? ;-)

Yes, having used the panels for a fairly complex project, I find there are a lot of issues, e.g. arrays aren't supported inside UDTs in faceplates.  My overall impression is that this is a somewhat 'green,' i.e. young, product.

But I actually think the biggest weakness, which will limit Siemens market penetration with this product, is the queued tag writes in response to touch inputs.  I.e. you press a button, and instead of writing a PLC tag immediately, the write is put in a queue and so the status update is seen as laggy.  This makes a big difference to the perception of quality.  It doesn't matter how fast your HMI processor is and how fast it can run scripts, if it doesn't have a fast response to touch inputs, it's seen as slow.  Classic Comfort panels got this right - when you press a button, the runtime is interrupted to write the tag.