Secure approach for providing combined environment for owners/operators and multiple third parties to cooperatively engineer, operate, and maintain an industrial process control and automation system

A method includes creating, in a secure platform, multiple securely-partitioned system sandboxes under control of at least one user associated with an industrial process control and automation system. Different system sandboxes are associated with different third parties who are not owners or operators of the industrial process control and automation system. The method also includes receiving content from the third parties in the system sandboxes. The method further includes receiving from the at least one user a selective activation of at least some of the content in the system sandboxes in order to place the at least some of the content into use by the industrial process control and automation system. The content could include equipment configurations for equipment associated with the industrial process control and automation system, and the equipment configurations could include control strategies and visualizations for the equipment.