We are now planning to move an application that uses ProfiNet communications to OPC standard and I'm trying to gather all relevant sources of informations on that.
Specifically, I noted at the bottom of this help page the note (highlight is mine):
You also can share live data from an industrial network by connecting to OPC systems using network variables or the DataSocket Library.
For the life of me I wasn't able to find any documentation about using network variables to connect to an OPC server: can somebody help me? Also, I seem to understand that Datasocket is somewhat out of date and network variables are more efficient in modern network environment: am I wrong?