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.

As you grow your organization in Copia, user management becomes an increasingly complex problem. That’s why we shipped new integrations for third party identity providers this past February. But we’re always looking for ways to make user and permissions management faster and more painless, so today we are announcing a major upgrade to our user management interface. We’re launching our redesigned user management dashboard with several new features that make management of users and licenses easier than ever. Below is a full-screen view of what you will now see in the user management homepage. 

Some of the new features we’d like to highlight are:

User activity & license usage charts:

A common refrain we’ve heard from team leaders is that they’d love to see how many of their users are actually active, so they can offer additional training or reallocate write seats more efficiently. We’ve gone one step further: members of the Owners team can now see a breakdown of how many users in their organization last used Copia within various time horizons. Selecting one section of the pie chart will filter the user table to only show users whose last activity date on Copia falls in that timeframe.

We have also moved all information about license usage (write seats for Source Control users, and Agent/Device usage for DeviceLink users) into a single view, so you no longer have to navigate between multiple pages to understand your organization’s license usage.

This visualization is visible only to users who are part of the “Owners” team.

Improved user table filtering and sorting:

You can now filter the user table for multiple additional dimensions: team associations, repository associations, and whether a user is occupying a paid seat. You can also sort the “Last active date” column ascending or descending. We are also bringing our click-to-filter menus from the job history table to the user table - click on a team association or repo association, and choose whether you want to add it to a table filter or navigate directly to the team or repo page.

You can also save filters by bookmarking or copying the page URL - filters are now encoded directly in the URL for easier storing and sharing.

Export user list to CSV:

Members of the Owners team can now export a full CSV of all Copia users in their organization, including their team/repository associations and assigned permission levels. This feature is meant to support organizations who wish to audit user permissions using external tools.

Thank you and please reach out with any questions - we are always here to help and look forward to continually improving our product and your user experience!

We're excited to announce a valuable new update to Copia Copilot: Chat History! Now, your Copilot conversations are more useful and easier to manage than ever.

What's new:

• Auto-Titled Conversations: Each conversation automatically receives a clear, meaningful title based on your interaction, making it easy to find specific sessions.
• Indefinite Conversation Retention: Your conversations with Copilot are stored indefinitely, allowing you to continue conversations seamlessly, whether they took place days, weeks, or even months ago.
• Conversation Search: Quickly locate previous discussions or questions you've asked, making it simple to revisit past interactions.

Chat History ensures you never lose track of important Copilot interactions, significantly boosting your productivity and enhancing your workflow.

For more details, check out the Chat History documentation.

We're excited to announce the release of Smart Filter for RSLogix 500 devices, now available in Copia Automation's DeviceLink!

Smart Filter intelligently reduces noise in your automated backups by filtering out routine, non-impactful changes—like fluctuating tag values and configuration data—so your team can quickly identify and focus on meaningful logic modifications.

Benefits include:

• Clearer change histories and simplified audits.
• Reduced noise.
• Enhanced productivity for your engineering team.

Take advantage of Smart Filter today and streamline your automation device management!

Learn more and get started →