It’s hard to debate Tridium’s legacy as an industry pioneer in creating a web-served GUI for BAS applications. While Niagara AX greatly improved user experience, the process of creating good looking web graphics for browsers has remained relatively cumbersome; though Niagara 4 brought incremental improvement. Without templates, system integrators still face the time-consuming (and expensive) problem of engineering jobs through Niagara.
There have been many thousands of Niagara sites with supervisory graphics designed through the years, many of which now require upgrading and re-designing. This presents an opportunity for end-users to consider alternatives in the market.
Since 2015, ASI has partnered with J2 Innovations to create IntelliFRONT, the first fully-mobile responsive, HTML5 compliant front end designed to work directly with Niagara. IntelliFRONT boasts a faster graphics creation and system configuration time because we automated many of the traditionally inefficient processes by leveraging the power of Haystack tagging. This means you can create great-looking graphics, update configurations of devices, and batch program edit with the click of a button. The IntelliFRONT Framework is about far more than just the supervisory GUI. IntelliFRONT’s alarming, scheduling, and global control functions are streamlined because we based our software architecture on tagging and the automated configuration that it enables.
Connecting to a Niagara station is effortless using the nHaystack driver, which is freely available via Stackhub.org. A detailed video series from J2 Innovations provides an in-depth look at integration. With IntelliFRONT you’ll see a great pay-off from the first job. Our system integrator partners use IntelliFRONT to manage Niagara-based systems because they like the enhanced user experience they can offer customers, and the lower engineering costs incurred. Speak with our sales department for more information or to find out how to integrate IntelliFront into your next N4 project.
