Dream Report is known for its report generation capability and outputting reports in PDF, Excel and CSV file formats. An important part of any Report Generation product is the ability to support user interaction, manual data entry and report organization. For those, the ideal solution comes in the form of a Web Portal.

In the world of automation, ease of use is a requirement Critical to Quality (CTQ).  It is also widely recognized that Microsoft dominates the world of automation platforms in industrial applications.  But in answering the question of best platform, we should list all the potential requirements:

  • Ease of Use – This really means minimized or no configuration
  • Highly secure
  • Flexible
  • A platform that is improving with time

Ocean Data Systems has selected the IIS (Internet Information Services) that is part of every Windows operating system as the Web Server technology for Dream Report.  IIS meets all the requirements listed above:

Ease of use – to achieve this CTQ, Dream Report requires that you install the IIS .NET extensions.  These enable Dream Report to interact with IIS to do all the configuration work for you.  All you need to do is define the name for your Web Portal in Dream Report, select a few other defaults and Dream Report will automatically build your Web Portal, and manage it for you.  It automatically creates two versions, one for full browsers and one for mobile browsers.

Highly secure – The likely alternative to Microsoft IIS is the Open Source solution – Apache. So we’ll explore security based on that.

Microsoft says, “The Microsoft Security Response Center engages with external security researchers and is even involved in the security community through its participation in, for example, the Black Hat conference.  These efforts have resulted in a substantial reduction in vulnerabilities across the Microsoft product suite, with particularly steep reductions in OS, Web server, and database vulnerabilities.  The modular nature of IIS 7.0 further reduces the risk of exploitable flaws, as most modules are not installed by default to keep the attack surface small. 

In addition to having fewer vulnerabilities, IIS includes a number of new security features.  For example, IIS 7.0 isolates each Web site into its own “sandbox” to help prevent single-site exploits and failures from compromising other sites or the entire server.  The IIS process, which executes requests from the web, run as a restricted user account by default, and does not require administrative privileges.  To further protect the Web server, IIS 7.0 includes request filtering. Request filtering is a rules-based security module that inspects every incoming request for malicious request patterns, such as SQL injection attacks. This prevents some malicious requests from ever reaching the core Web server.”

Flexibility – For Dream Report, this means the ability to co-exist with other products that also use IIS.  These can be for HMI/SCADA Web Portals, Analytic Tools, etc.  As you can see above, IIS includes sandbox technology to isolate sites (Web Portals) from each other.  That, and the Dream Report ability to automatically configure its Web Portal entirely for you, based on your simple definitions, delivers an elegant and flexible solution.

A platform to build on – This speaks to the selection of the right technology.  You’ll want to invest your time and effort in learning and supporting the right platform, even if Dream Report does the work for you.  For this, we should look at the statistics for Web Server deployment.

 

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2014/02/03/february-2014-web-server-survey.html

Over the past few years, Microsoft IIS popularity has been growing, and there is a decline in use of Apache.

While Apache is a strong platform, for the world of automation and industry, and for purposes of a Dream Report Web Portal, it is clear that Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) is the ideal platform.  There are no extra costs.  Microsoft IIS is part of every operating system and only needs to be enabled in Windows Programs and Features.  And, Dream Report fully automates its configuration and operation as a secure and interactive report generator portal.