OPOS Drivers

OPOS Standard
OPOS is the first widely-adopted POS device standard. It was initiated by Microsoft, NCR, Epson, and Fujitsu-ICL to help integrate POS hardware into applications for the Windows™ family of operating systems. OPOS uses COM technology, and is therefore language independent.
The first OPOS technical meeting was convened in January, 1995. The first production release, 1.01, was made in March, 1996. Its seventh release, 1.6, was in July, 2001. Beginning with release 1.7, the OPOS committee no longer releases an implementation-specific document. The UnifiedPOS document has added implementation information into an appendix.

What is "OLE for Retail POS?"
OLE for Retail POS or OPOS consists of:

· An architecture for Win32-based POS device access. OPOS is currently deployed on Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows CE.
· A set of POS device interfaces sufficient to support a wide range of POS solutions. Release 1.6 includes 21 device classes.

General OPOS Model
OLE for Retail POS Controls adheres to the ActiveX Control specifications. They expose properties, methods, and events to a containing Application. The controls are invisible at run time, and rely exclusively upon the containing application for requests through methods and sometimes properties. Responses are given to the application through method return values and parameters, properties, and events.

An application can use the ActiveX control to communicate with a hardware device in a standard fashion. The OPOS Model has two deliverables for each hardware device. The Control Object, ie ActiveX Control, is used within the application by the application developer and provides a common interface to the device. The Service Object, usually a DLL, provides a device specific interface to the hardware device and it communicates with the Control Object.

UnifiedPOS
UnifiedPOS was initiated by a consortium of retailers, and is led by the National Retail Federation. Beginning with release 1.5, both OPOS and JavaPOS have approved UnifiedPOS as the owner of language and operating system independent POS device interfaces. OPOS then maps these interfaces for COM within Windows, and JavaPOS maps them for Java.

ID Innovations OPOS Drivers
ID Innovations provides OPOS controls that are compliant to different levels of the OPOS/UnifiedPOS specification. If you have an application that supports OPOS compliant devices you will need to download the version specific to your applications support. To use the OPOS control, simply download the appropriate release and change the device name within your application to that of the ID Innovations MSR “IDIMSR”. Some applications refer to the Device ID as the MSR ID or Scanner ID. Once you do this, your application will locate the appropriate Service Object for the device and will be able to operate it normally.

ID Innovations provides the following OPOS compliant Releases: (Choose the appropriate release based on your software, they should refer to what level of OPOS support they have)

OPOS Version 1.03
OPOS Version 1.06
UnifiedPOS Version 1.11

To download the release go to our downloads page at www.idinnovations.com\downloads.html

Note: If your application supports some other release of OPOS or UnifiedPOS control then you will want to use Version 1.11 as it has support for all previous releases of the OPOS/UnifiedPOS specifications.