Siemens Portal and the releases, now v12 SP1 + UPD 3

Hellow,

I've been using Portal v10 and v11 for programming some S7-1200 CPU's. Now we are working with the v12 + SP1 + Upd 3, the last version of Simatic Portal. Our company is a system integrator and works with brands like Siemens, Mitsubishi, Beckhoff, etc... Therefor we work with VM's (VMWare).

We are with 5 programmers and work on projects with the new S7-1500 CPU. If I can choose on projects, I keep working with Simatic v5.5, but for the S7-1500 we have no choice.

Now, there isn't a day passing by without a crash, even worse... each portal on every programmer's PC crashes more then once a day... Simatic v5.5 is very stable and allmost never crashes.

I'm sure there are a lot of topics on the many many bugs in Siemens Portal of the current version and the previous ones.

1. Didn't Siemens released the S7-1500 and Portal Professional too soon ? Again we customers are the testbunny's to debug their lot's and lot's of bugs in the software.

2. We work with VM's, the performance is much less then when you install it on your PC without Virtual environment. Does Portal runs good on your PC's ? I don't like to install Siemens on a Windows machine, because you get Sindows, so not only because we use other brands, but also because we don't want to make our PC's unstable...

3. I don't understand that such an expensive brand can sell such beta-looking software full of bugs and act like it's normal to have a lot of hotfixes, updates, service packs and new releases... ? Siemens is one of a kind if we talk about software updates, damn.

I sound like complaining, well, I think a lot of Portal users feel the same.

I'm sure the following releases will run better, I just think Siemens released their software way too soon..

regards,
Combo

I use TIA v12+SP1+Upd2.
Generally I think that the socalled updates are less debugged than the servicepacks. So I always wait a couple of weeks before installing the updates.

I only use the WinCC part, not the STEP7 part.

I dont have problems with crashes, but I do find TIA to have a little bit of delay in its user interface. Enough to be annoying. I can imagine that installing TIA in a VM doesnt help on that.

I think that TIA is not nearly as bad as WinCC Flexible as when WinCC Flexible 2004 came out. On the other hand, by version 2005 SP1 HF7 WinCC Flexible was stable. I think it will take much longer than that for TIA.