Mobile Access

You can use Mobile Access (sometimes also called Studio Mobile Access or SMA) to deploy an HTML5-enhanced web interface that presents alarms, trends, process values, and even project screens in a unified, easy-to-use "dashboard".

This web interface is designed for smartphones and tablets, such as Android and iOS devices, but it can be accessed from almost any computer using a modern web browser.

It is important to remember that although Mobile Access is part of the same project runtime and may be hosted on the same server that hosts the screens published for Thin Clients, it is a distinct interface based on platform-agnostic technology. Our traditional Thin Client software is based on ActiveX technology, and as such, it can run only on Windows computers. In contrast, the Mobile Access web interface is based on HTML5, so it can run in most web browsers on most computers and devices.

To use Mobile Access, you must have a web server running on the same computer that hosts your project runtime server, and you need to install and configure some additional software that creates the actual Mobile Access web interface and allows the web server to communicate with the project runtime server. This software is available both for Microsoft IIS and for other, CGI-enabled web servers (such as Apache).

Also, your software license must include enough Thin Clients to accommodate all of the users that you expect to access the Mobile Access web interface at the same time. Please contact your vendor to review your software license. For more information, see License Settings.

The rest of this section describes how to set up your web server for Mobile Access, how to configure the Mobile Access web interface during project development, and how to log on to and navigate the web interface during project run time. You should already be familiar with how to locate and open worksheets in the Project Explorer, how to edit a worksheet, and how to save and close a worksheet.