OPOS, full name OLE for Retail POS, a platform specific implementation of UnifiedPOS, is a

point of sale The point of sale (POS) or point of purchase (POP) is the time and place at which a retail transaction is completed. At the point of sale, the merchant calculates the amount owed by the customer, indicates that amount, may prepare an invoice f ...

device standard for Microsoft

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

operating systems An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

that was initiated by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

, NCR,

Epson Seiko Epson Corporation, or simply known as Epson, is a Japanese multinational electronics company and one of the world's largest manufacturers of computer printers and information- and imaging-related equipment. Headquartered in Suwa, Nagano ...

, and Fujitsu-ICL and is managed by the Association for Retail Technology Standards. The OPOS API was first published in January 1996. The standard uses component object model and, because of that, all languages that support COM controls (i.e.

Visual C++ Microsoft Visual C++ (MSVC) is a compiler for the C, C++ and C++/CX programming languages by Microsoft. MSVC is proprietary software; it was originally a standalone product but later became a part of Visual Studio and made available in both tr ...

Visual Basic Visual Basic is a name for a family of programming languages from Microsoft. It may refer to: * Visual Basic .NET (now simply referred to as "Visual Basic"), the current version of Visual Basic launched in 2002 which runs on .NET * Visual Basic (c ...

, and C#) can be used to write applications. The OPOS standard specifies two levels for an OPOS control, the control object which presents an abstract hardware interface to a family of devices such as receipt printer and the service object which handles the interface between the control object and the actual physical device such as a specific model of receipt printer. This division of functionality provides a way for the application development to write to an abstract hardware interface while allowing the application to work with a variety of different hardware. The only requirement is that a hardware vendor supplies an OPOS compatible service object with their particular hardware offering. Typically a manufacturer of point of sale terminals will provide along with a terminal operating system an OPOS control object package with a software utility that is used to configure OPOS settings. Such a utility will specify the settings for an OPOS control object and indicate the service object to be used with a particular OPOS profile. When the point of sale application starts up, it loads the OPOS control object and the OPOS control object in turn loads the service object specified by the current OPOS profile. The Windows Registry is typically used as the persistent store for device settings. The hardware device manufacturer will normally provide a utility for device specific settings used by the service object.

Operating systems

OPOS can be deployed on the following operating systems: *

Microsoft Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturin ...

Microsoft Windows 98 Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. The second operating system in the 9x line, it is the successor to Windows 95, and was released t ...

Microsoft Windows ME Windows Millennium Edition, or Windows Me (marketed with the pronunciation of the pronoun "me"), is an operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It is the successor to Windo ...

Microsoft Windows NT Windows NT is a Proprietary software, proprietary Graphical user interface, graphical operating system produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released on July 27, 1993. It is a processor-independent, multiprocessing and multi-use ...

Microsoft Windows 2000 Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It was the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was released to manufacturing on December 15, 1999, and was officially ...

Microsoft Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

Microsoft Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

Microsoft Windows CE Windows Embedded Compact, formerly Windows Embedded CE, Windows Powered and Windows CE, is an operating system subfamily developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows Embedded family of products. Unlike Windows Embedded Standard, which is ba ...

Microsoft Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, ...

* Microsoft Windows 8 * Microsoft Windows 10

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Opos Microsoft application programming interfaces Retail point of sale systems Standards

Operating systems

See also

References