We’re excited to announce support for FactoryTalk Linx as the communication software for your DeviceLink Studio 5000 devices running FW >=V31, enabled by the Logix Designer SDK. This update expands DeviceLink’s reliability and flexibility for Studio 5000 users by addressing several common backup challenges.

What’s New

FactoryTalk Linx Support
You can now use FactoryTalk Linx on your Agent machine instead of being limited to RSLinx. This eliminates the need to recreate devices and network paths in RSLinx just to run backups.

Improved Networking
Backups now support nested communication paths. No more rewiring networks just to make DeviceLink work.

More Reliable Backups
RSLinx re-browsing issues often caused failed backups. With the Logix SDK integration, we've significantly reduced the need to manually re-browse devices.

Broader Device Coverage
Additional Rockwell controllers, such as PlantPAX devices, are now recognized and supported for backups.

For important information about the capabilities and limitations of this new feature, please visit our documentation using the button below.

View Docs

You can now connect Copia with Azure DevOps Boards and Work Items! With this integration, any commit message or Pull Request comment in Copia that references a Work Item will automatically add a comment to the corresponding Azure Work Item, including a direct link back to Copia as seen in the image below.

If your company uses Azure DevOps Work Items for project management and ticket tracking, this feature now makes it easier to track changes, navigate between tools, and keep your development workflow connected.

Learn how to set it up →

In addition to a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery solution, we've seen increasing interest in using DeviceLink as an observability tool. Our most advanced customers don't just want their projects backed up - they want to see how often their code is changing, how well their backup solutions are performing, and which of their devices haven't been backing up. We've recently released a number of improvements to our dashboards and data visualizations in DeviceLink, including our Site Dashboard and our user management dashboard. Today, we're adding to that list with an improved DeviceLink organization dashboard that organizes data on all of your sites into one convenient table view.

Each row in the table represents one site in DeviceLink. Previously, sites were displayed as "cards" at the bottom of the page, with buttons that linked to the list of projects, devices, jobs, and agents within that site. These pages can still be reached by clicking on the number in each cell. The table format also brings the job run graphs into the same view as the remainder of the site data, allowing for quick data comparisons.

We've also made some nice improvements to the job run graphs. We've kept the ability to filter on custom date ranges (both relative and fixed), as well as the ability to filter by job run status. But we've made the graphs much more information-dense, which means you can now look at large date ranges without needing to scroll horizontally.

We've also introduced a condensed view, where we display the total count of each job run status for the selected date range in a single row instead of a graph. This view allows you to quickly compare the backup performance of many sites in a single screen.

Finally, we've heard from our users and we've delivered it - no more pagination for looking at more than ten sites. Additional sites will now load automatically as you scroll down the table.

Further information about the Organization Dashboard can be found in our documentation.

For anyone who's used an LLM-powered chatbot, you know that it takes some practice to write prompts in a way that give you the answers you need. Sometimes the difference between a vague response and a useful one is including some critical context about your target audience or desired response format. At Copia, we've had a fair amount of experience using conversational LLMs, and we've built some experience with which prompts yield good results for controls engineers. We're introducing Suggested Prompts to Copilot's chat tool to make this experimentation process faster for our Copilot users as well.

Suggested prompts will appear as bubbles when you start a new chat in Copilot Chat. Many prompts require an attached Rockwell Studio 5000 or Siemens TIA Portal file, so you may also be prompted to attach a file from a repository in Copia. These prompts can be also edited after they are generated, so you can think of them as "building blocks" to construct your own prompts.

For more information about Copilot Chat, see our documentation, or contact us to add Copilot to your Copia account.

Copia has expanded support for Schneider Electric’s Control Expert through both:

• Source Control: rendering and change visualization
• DeviceLink: automated backup

This support extends through Control Expert V16.2, the most current version of the IDE.

Copia users can now confidently manage their latest Schneider Control Expert projects with seamless versioning, collaboration, and device backups.

👉 Learn more about our Control Expert support in our Documentation here:

• Control Expert in Source Control
• Control Expert in DeviceLink

We’re excited to announce that Copia Copilot's chat now supports Siemens TIA Portal projects. With this update, you can reference items from your repository's TIA Portal projects directly in Copilot chat to streamline your workflow.

Copilot can now help you:

• Explain code to improve clarity and understanding
• Document code to create useful, consistent documentation
• Generate example reference code to use as a guide for development (note: exporting generated code is not currently supported; it will need to be recreated in the IDE)

This enhancement makes Copilot an even more powerful partner for engineers working in Siemens environments.

Siemens TIA Portal support for Copilot for DeviceLink is forthcoming and will be released in the near future.

👉 Learn more in our documentation on Copilot for TIA Portal.

We’ve expanded our support for Beckhoff users! Copia now renders TwinCAT 3 TwinSAFE logic and differences in Source Control — no setup required.

Just open any repository containing TwinSAFE project files, and you’ll be able to:

• 🔍 View raw TwinSAFE logic in a readable format
• 👀 See visual diffs between versions
• 💬 Comment on TwinSAFE code in Pull Request reviews

This makes code collaboration, review, and version control for TwinSAFE logic smoother than ever.

Log in, open your repo, and try it out, or visit our Documentation to read more about our TwinSAFE support.

Copia now supports rendering for CODESYS Continuous Function Chart (CFC) projects — no configuration needed.

Simply navigate to a repository containing CFC programs and you'll be able to:

• 👀 View raw CFC logic in an easy-to-read format
• 🔄 Compare visual diffs between revisions
• 💬 Leave comments on CFC logic in Pull Request reviews

Whether you're reviewing changes or just browsing project history, CODESYS CFC logic is now fully integrated into your version control workflow.

Open a project and see it in action — it’s already live! Or, visit our Documentation to read more about our CODESYS support.

DeviceLink Site Dashboards are now available!

At Copia, we know how much observability can make a difference to efficient and resilient operations. That’s why we’re releasing site dashboards: a new tool that helps you monitor DeviceLink performance at your sites in real time. By using DeviceLink's dashboards, you can also identify patterns of issues on devices and ensure your Copia configuration is complete.

Here is a tour of a few of the capabilities included in the site dashboard:

1. Dedicated dashboard URL

Each site has its own site dashboard, and each dashboard has its own dedicated URL. The DeviceLink site dashboard is designed to be bookmarked as a “first stop” for reviewing a site’s configuration and performance. It can also be used as a view for an always-on monitor at a site.

2. Project Health table

The Project Health table summarizes the configuration status of all projects at your site, indicating whether there are any Projects that require additional setup or configuration to run backups properly. It also gives a summarized overview of job status by project, allowing you to quickly identify patterns of failure. For a detailed description of the configuration issues monitored by the Project Health table, please see our documentation.

3. Job Run Status graph

The Job Run Status graph is a large version of the DeviceLink graphs available on the Sites page. A larger form factor allows for more careful review and easier filtering interactions. To see all job runs with a selected status, hover over one of the sections of the bar graph. You can also use the filter menu on the top right of the graph to filter the graph for certain job run statuses. Clicking on a section of the graph will open the Job History page filtered for the selected date range and job status. The graph can be adjusted for multiple time horizons (last 24 hours, last 7 days, and last 30 days). In our user research, we found that many engineers preferred reviewing a consistent timeframe regularly, so the dashboard will remember your selection the next time you load the page.

4. Agents table

The Agents table summarizes the status and utilization percentage of all agents (single-site and multi-site) available at your site. An agent’s utilization is defined as the percentage of time it was busy running jobs in a given time period. As with the Job Run Status graph above, the Agents table will remember your previous time period selection. 

A more thorough overview of the features in the site dashboard can be found in our documentation. We look forward to your feedback on this new observability feature and will be shipping more features like it soon!

We’re excited to announce expanded support for Schneider Control Expert users! Copia now renders exported Unity section files in the following formats: .XBD, .XLD, .XDD, .XDB, and .XST. This enhancement gives Controls Engineers more flexibility when working with exported Control Expert project sections, enabling a smoother version control and review experience directly within Copia.

Start leveraging these new formats today and streamline your workflow even further! You can read more about our Control Expert rendering support in our Documentation.