Tech Tip: Using Siemens Industry Support Site

hey everybody in today's tech tip i invited louis back on the show to teach us how to use the siemens industry support website to quickly find manuals downloads and application notes lewis thanks for coming back on tech tips i'm looking forward to learning how to use the support website for siemens i know the first time i went up there it was like a lot to take in and i really appreciate you coming on the show to kind of give me and our viewers a walkthrough on how to best use this site yeah sean no problem thanks for uh for allowing us to to show you and your users a little bit about how our support site works looking forward to it so what you see here on the screen industry online support site um first of all we often if you talk to anybody siemens we usually call this cos or s-i-o-s siemens industry online support you'll see that acronym thrown out thrown around a lot i think even when we talk about like the industry online support app it's like called cosapp but to get to the support site you need to know the url so you could easily always google siemens industry online support or siemens online support or just go to support.industry.siemens.com pretty simple url i'm here in the united states so you know i'm using the us version but um of course you can see the languages are you know vary depending on what country you're in and and what language you select so um just a quick disclaimer there in case you're in canada and you prefer french or something like that or english all right so first thing you you open the support site there's a lot of information on this page it can be a little bit overwhelming so i definitely understand your issue at first sean when when you first got to this site hopefully after today help ease some of that confusion make it a little bit easier to navigate and clarify some things uh questions if you have any so right off the bat like i said there's a lot of information if you there's two search bars right anytime we want to know any kind of information about anything first thing we do is we google and we type in the search bar what we want to find out right the support site is no different i happen to be logged in by the way um but you don't have to log in to see this information to access the information for the most part uh there is some some information like downloading software where you do need to have a login and um there are you know if it's export restricted software we do need to to vet and approve but for the most part creating a login for the siemens industry uh online support site uh it's free you don't need to have any kind of like support contracts or agreements with us you don't even have to be a siemens customer honestly to uh to set up an account so that's a good thing but if you do sign in there's a little sign in button on the top and you can just click sign in and type in your credentials and go from there but the benefits of signing in is more on the my support side i'll start off and just show some of the features you can get without signing in and then we'll kind of move into some of the uh my support features that i think would be useful for most of your your viewers that's excellent i know most of the time i come up here i'm in a rush so i don't sign in and i'm able to access everything manuals uh tech notes articles all that kind of stuff which is great yeah and so you can i mean you can see on on the left there's kind of shortcuts already that takes you to you know app examples faqs manuals downloads so you could always navigate to those if you want to but there's still some filtering and maybe searching you have to do once you get past there right i mean it's gonna if you click on manuals it's going to click on every single manual for every industry product that ever made you know so there's still some some filtering to do there you'll notice this like i said two search bars you might be wondering why two different search bars this one is more for like product or article number related if you happen to know the specific part number that you're looking for or even if you know like a piece of it um there's kind of an intellisense on this um search bar so like if i start typing in 60 s7 215 i know that that's kind of the beginning part numbers for an s7 1215 and i can start typing it but i don't know the rest for say the dc-dc dc variant i typed that in and voila here comes uh 12 15 and i can select it and once i click on it the support site goes to and shows me every single entry related to this specific part that i selected from the drop down um so so that's kind of nice um and then you can also filter from there at that point to app notes downloads faq manuals and bring it down a little bit less from say 365 to 29 entries and if you type in a search term be a little bit more specific from that point too the other search bar which is on the upper right is always there this one doesn't necessarily have the same intellisense um it it does in the in respect to like um so like you know this is oops i typed in the park i'm left out of seven so it has a little bit of intellisense but you don't see like the description of the part here so it's not as as i don't know say intelligent uh for lack of a better term as the other search bar uh but this one's also good uh honestly both search bars are good for um for for general search terms as well so like say i want safety plc programming which there or if i searched it on this bar that could have worked too but and you can see there's like a little bar it's really thin on this browser well it's thin on all browsers but you can see when the when the system is actually loading some of these pages may take a while to load so just pay attention to see if that you know if it's if it's not loading you won't see like a blue bar kind of updating if it is you know slowly updating then you'll see that there so i typed in safety plc programming and there's some some part numbers that it thinks relates to what i'm looking for but it also kind of filters a little bit more into what i'm looking for and say i was looking for the programming manual for this somatic controllers uh here it is first term that came up i can click on it and and and go from there i can also filter um according to um you know dates date date sorting or relevant sorting the other thing to point out is um every entry in the siemens industry online support site has a unique identifier unique id entry entry id um and so on the search bar you can also if you happen to know this entry id you can also type that in the search bar and it'll take you straight to that entry um you know nine times out of ten if you if you contact like siemens uh support or somebody from siemens and um they refer you to a manual or some specific entry in the support site they'll likely give you you know either an entry id number like what you you know seeing here uh or they'll give you maybe the direct link to the entry but you know in case maybe your your email server projects any hyperlinks or something like that for security you could also just type that in to your browser or type in this entry id into the search bar the other thing is the type of entry is usually shown next to it in kind of a grayish color you can see here um let me go full screen so you can see here in the grayish color um there's you know a manual uh that this clearly shows that this is a manual you could also kind of see what type of manual it is below it uh the latest uh version of it and actually uh same thing with like faqs application examples downloads so this is actually a download to the software uh programming software for our safety plc's in ti portal this one's for version 16 but version 17 just came out um but the other thing is like so if i click on this manual for example um well this was probably a poor for example but some of the manuals you'll see this addition filter and it's just a drop down menu so let's say you want to find uh an older version of programming and configuring that's maybe relevant to the version of software you're using or you programmed in you can click it from this drop down and it'll show so the same entry number exists but you can actually select the specific the specific addition that that that you're looking for that's excellent yeah i wish other vendors would do that that's great yeah it makes it a lot easier honestly um and then the other thing is uh the other thing when you're looking at a menu at a manual is let's say you don't want to like download the entire like this one is you know 11 megabytes and depending on your your your internet speed maybe you don't want to download the full manual you just want to you know what you're looking for and you just want to see what it says and you just want to quickly navigate to it you can click on that configure link and actually kind of see it embedded within the web page itself so you know let's say i specifically wanted to look at um you know how to know how protection for fail-safe function blocks uh i can navigate to that within the configuration of the manual instead of downloading the pdf waiting for it to download opening it up and then navigating to that chapter i can do that directly on here and the cool thing is i can export just this page uh if i wanted to to maybe email that to somebody or i can click this little url button and it shows the short url i can copy it to my clipboard and put that in the email send that to somebody and it takes them straight to this page of the manual that's that is so useful yeah i use that often actually um when people ask for for something i'm like instead of sending them to the manual i just send them straight to the page of the manual where they can get you know the specific answer that they're looking for yeah with other vendors it's not as clean that's awesome yeah so this um so so i showed you like with the two search fields right then there's this other option that i prefer it's called product support which you saw when i typed in the s7 1200 part number but let's say you don't have the part number and you want to be able to browse to the part if i go to if i just hover over the home button i can go to product support um same thing with you know app notes and there are forums too so you can provide input you can ask questions to other users and um there already may be an entry for you know a forum entry for the question you have but the cool thing is so this product support i can actually browse to the specific maybe product that of interest right so i let's say i want to know get some information on the s7 1200 um i don't know say digital modules an i o card that i'm using on my 1200 plc i don't know the part number um i can actually uh type in the family and then this filters out specifically to that family that i've already selected and the products and say it's this uh this eight in eight out io card i can select it from the list the pop up part number populates automatically and i can see all the entries specific to that part uh and then i can even uh drill down more specifically to the type of entry yep manuals faqs firmware downloads whatever product notes things like that so um you can see i put manuals and now it's narrowed down to four there's four manuals that this product is either mentioned in or related to all right so these are basically the basic functions within the support site you don't need to log in to access these features or functions you don't need a login really to download the manuals what you do need a login for sometimes is like i said to download firmware or to download specific software and that's where um we're setting up a user login really has its benefits not just for that purpose of being able to download certain things but to be able to use some of the features of my support now you were saying that i don't need to buy a support contract to create a user here correct that's correct yeah yeah you just you know typical metadata name email um you know company information and address and um and that's it it may take i will say it may take a couple days to get to get uh approved so my advice is you know if you know if you're gonna have siemens products or you have siemens products in your plants or on your your machine or anything just set up the login it it doesn't you know like i said it does you don't require a support contract to set it up or anything like that and it'll be a lot easier when you do need to download something and then you don't have to wait to get that export you know uh restriction approval you just the system's already gone through that and you you set up your approval and you can go right ahead and there's times yeah there's times where we've done like uh online uh workshops or something they need to download portal but then uh they go to set up their username and and they have to wait three days to get their their name approved or something um their information approved so don't wait till you need it just uh set it up early and that way um you get it out of the way uh it's there all right so i talked about my support setting up the login so once you log in you have this ability now let's say i have this product on my machine on my platform floor and i'm going to be referencing this information quite often um maybe i want to set up a login for all my maintenance guys to have access to to this i can actually save this filter right here where it says save filter i can load a specific filter and i can also set up an email to send me an email anytime anything within this filter include basically i have it set to manuals so anytime these four manuals are updated uh modified or there's a new one added to this list i get an email basically set up uh uh sent them to the email address set up for the uh username uh notify me of those change so if i hit filter i can just go my filter this little check box basically does both that you know two steps in one uh or having this checkbox here enables that step of setting up an email notification and then once i set that up i can choose to go back to product support or just go straight to the my support page so if i click product support it takes me right back to uh that same page i was on before i set up uh clicked on save filter um all right so so now i'm gonna go into some of the my support features uh and just kind of briefly overview some of those so if i when i first go into the support site right i can click on my support and it'll take me to this page and there's quite a few there's a there's a few kind of tiles that uh direct you to certain areas of the support side certain features obviously the first one is support request creating support requests so anytime you have any you want to reach out to siemens directly for support you can just click support request and since you have the login you know all the all your information is automatically populated in there all your contact info you type in more specifics about the question you have and uh go from there and somebody will contact you within a couple hours one thing worth noting sean is that our support is i don't know if i'm not sure if this is true in every country but i know in the u.s at least in north america our support is for free from eight to five um eight to five local time monday through friday anything after hours or um you know priority support things like that you can choose to optionally get a service contract but for the most part you can set up a support request and not have a service contract with siemens and we'll will get you up and running as quickly as possible that's awesome yeah that is online and phone support right so on-site support then it's a different story yeah oh yeah so um all right so set up a support request pretty easy the filters you know this is basically like i said you can see all the filters that you've set up i just created my filter so you can see that these are some other filters that i've set up when you when you see this little bell icon that basically means hey you've set up a notification for that filter so um you know you'll get an email anytime anything changes with those let me go back my favorites um that is like if you want to favorite a specific entry um not just the filters but let's say there's a manual or an app note that you um set up as like hey i'm going to probably reference this quite a bit i want to make sure i can navigate it to navigate to it pretty quickly that's that's you can set it up as a favorite and again you can also set up notifications for that specific entry uh anytime something changes right so some of these i have here you can see they're like application examples so uh if this application example were to get updated with say version 17 or maybe there's a library you know that that siemens created and they've updated with ti portal version 17 or when version 18 comes out i can get notified saying hey the libraries have been updated um to the latest version and and take action as needed very cool yep and then notifications that basically is just a summary of all the notifications i set up filters plus favorites all in one so there's that and then the other feature is my products so my products is kind of cool so this is um we can get a little bit into the weeds on this but this allows you to actually set up specific products that are either in your plant or on your specific machine or if you're a machine builder maybe you want to keep track of you know maybe you have several customers you sent out several different machine types too you can actually do that through this uh my product feature and basically it's it's it's just a list of the products that are that you have um so you know in this example i have here you know i've got a customer and i've you know this customer has two different machine types installed of a machine builder you know two different machine types i can see all the specific products that they have of that machine i can have this isn't just limited to siemens products you can actually have third party products on here of course now when you put third party products in here you're not going to be like siemens isn't going to notify you if say their manual changes or you know we don't have their manuals uploaded on our industry support site so that's just something to be cognizant of but the reason why you would want maybe want to do that is because there's additional information that you can fill out for these individual products like installation date maybe serial numbers specific descriptions also delivery dates and things like that so that might be one reason why you would want to um put in even third-party products uh the other nice feature is i can export this product list so and i can also import so if i have a csv file or i want to copy and paste the part numbers from from a file say an excel table i can bring them in very easily i can manually enter them one by one but i can export this and send this to somebody um i can also do this product life cycle summary which um it's pretty nice because it gives kind of an overall summary as to where the overall life cycle status of all the products within that that product list uh so you can see with this list uh most of them are are still active you know products uh three or some sorry six percent of of the products are in the spare part status which means you know you can still get it as spare part but can't order it for new projects so um so yeah so that's kind of a neat feature there but the other benefit of having setting up a my products list is when you go to this uh product support right so i said mention that you can like browse for the specific product earlier right and that's like if you don't know the product number or maybe the specific name that we put in there there's this little check box here for my products and i select that and all of a sudden my product lists are shown here and i can be great drill down to just seeing entries just for the products that i have in my plant or on my machine or my line or whatever hierarchy i've you know put in for my product list it's a really nice feature there yeah and and the other thing i wanted to point out was you know if there's any updates obviously you'll see this like flag saying hey this is updated if there's something new it'll say new you know things like that so um and then lastly i guess the other thing this one's kind of like a little bit longer to demonstrate but my documentation is another nice feature where you can actually set up uh custom manuals maybe if you wanted to create maybe like a service manual for for uh like i brought up machine a for that my products list say i wanted a service manual for all the components within machine a i could take excerpts from the manuals of those individual components drop them into one single document and export it as an rtf xml pdf i can bring in my own say i have some cad models that i want to drop into the document and organize it i can basically create custom documentation without having to download all those manuals from all the you know individual product products and then you know go through a pdf editor and extract certain pages it becomes a lot of work and then to send all those files also is a lot of effort yeah we played around with that a little in the pre-show and i i love the ability just to drag and drop chapters out of manuals i mean you could take all of the wiring sections out of all the manuals make one wiring manual and give it to your the guy out there who's doing the wiring and he would have you know for all the i o cards and the controller he would have just the wiring sections of all the manuals and uh you know you can make operation and maintenance manuals and it's just really it was really flexible and cool and it's deep probably deeper than we can get into as so many so many features but um it's pretty pretty cool feature yeah i mean i yeah exactly so you you know i've created a service manual here for some project and customer at some point and you could see like i can you know just kind of drag this in and and like you said i can have you know wiring just the wiring section of this bigger manual instead of including this hot hole manual so and i can rename the sections right so maybe i don't want to call this wiring maybe i want to call it plc wiring or i o wiring add something more descriptive i can and then export that export the file easily as you know like i said rtf pdf or xml create a name change the language so if you're sending the grid the cool thing about this too is that if you're if you're sending this to another country right you may maybe you're a machine builder and you've got a global presence and you want to be able to you know send these manuals in spanish but you know maybe you don't have anybody who knows spanish to know what they're saying sending you can quickly define from this drop down hit okay and it'll create the whole manual in spanish for you you can save it in rtf which allows you to edit it in microsoft word which a lot of times people only give you the pdf so you really it's very difficult to edit that yep exactly so it's a really cool feature there i think that was it for now i mean we covered a lot of ground here so far sean um and i'm pretty sure i hope i didn't confuse the readers too much or overwhelm them too much with all the different options um one thing i do want to know is uh if you do kind of want kind of a short summary of some of the things we talked about with my support there are this these how-to videos here that you can click on when you go to the industry support site you go to how-to videos and it'll open up uh sub-videos of what we talked about today so my support setting up notifications uh and it also goes into like our we do have a mobile app that makes it easy to to access this information if you're on the go nice so that's that's pretty much it in a nutshell i wasn't sure if um if you had any other questions uh sean uh you know or if you viewers have any questions specific to the support site you know i'd be happy to help answer or they could create a support request too nice hey before we go can you just go into important topics at a glance i thought was pretty cool oh yeah so um so there's yeah within this i talked about this quick guide on the left you know you can go on faq zap notes but there's also this important topics at a glance nice thing about this is that you know rather than kind of going through that whole search uh function maybe you don't know exactly what you're looking for and you want to kind of see like an overview on um different topics or specific things you can actually uh go to their important topic at a glance and it kind of summarizes it breaks it down into specific maybe technology or different applications so i don't know let's say i wanted to find more information on uh the s7 1200 i can click on logo and s7 1200 it'll take me to a separate page that basically um you see that blue line loading up top there we go so basically it'll take us to kind of a summary page um that shows you know the different topics um and i could see okay let's say maybe i want to uh uh see something on building automation so i click on there and it'll jump straight down i could also just scroll down to these subsections but just makes it easier sometimes to find some of the content you're looking for if you're looking for maybe an exam application example for s7 1200 or logo for building automation um that might be you know some those might be worth something to check out uh industrial communication and sensors common application application examples yeah it's almost like a catalog view of everything that's up here and i i just thought some viewers might like to check that out because it does to me it just seems like an easier way if you're very new to the product to kind of you know browse through the content you know on on a product by product and you know topic basis yeah absolutely i i find it extremely helpful when it's uh like ti portal topics you know as you as you know tiaa portal is a is a pretty broad a very powerful software but it's you know got a lot of functionality to it and sometimes if you're just trying to figure out something specific to you know a certain function um you know maybe i just want to see the libraries in ti portal this is where i find this uh very very helpful very useful it's no coincidence why why ti portal is at the top in that case right it's probably one of the more more common uh uh areas that people search for information nice well lewis i really appreciate you coming on tech tips and showing us how you know to use the support site and really getting us up to speed on it i feel now i feel after sitting down with you today i feel a lot more comfortable using it and i really appreciate you coming on the show yeah again thank you anytime sean well i hope you enjoyed that demo i know i did i didn't even know about half of that stuff until i sat down with louis to get that update so really want to thank him for taking the time off his busy week to do that for us and i also want to thank siemens for making this episode ad free really appreciate it guys with that said uh check the description i have links there to their industry support website and um if you want to follow me or get in touch with me you can now do so over at automation.locals.com and with that i just want to wish you all of every safe happy and healthy week and until next time my friends peace

Channel: Insights In Automation

Views: 629

Keywords: Shawn Tierney, Insights In Automation, Siemens, Support, SIOS

Id: zDa9RRpfyzE

Length: 31min 38sec (1898 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 09 2021