Seamless Integration
Integration between event management, HR and resource-planning platforms form core of installation
- By Mitchell Kane
- Nov 01, 2015
Designed to a be a state-of-theart facility for students and faculty members at Oregon State University, Austin Hall could represent one of the most unique systems integration projects within the higher education market in the United States. The 100,000-square-foot building, which opened in the fall of 2014, seamlessly integrates building access control into a single data management solution that enables school officials to streamline ingress and egress, and also allows students and staff to reserve one of 21 project rooms in the facility simply by using their existing credential. In addition to the project rooms, the building features 10 classrooms, 10 conference rooms, IT closets, a four-room research suite, a mailroom and several event spaces.
To help manage access control at Austin Hall, including credentials for approximately 4,500 students each semester, Kirk Wydner, operating systems network analyst for the College of Business, and his team chose to deploy Vanderbilt Industries’ Security Management System (SMS). However, this would not be an ordinary access control installation.
According to Wydner, the system, installed by their security systems integrator Chown Security, had to not only work with existing HID Global identification cards used by students across campus, but it also had to have an easy-to-access user repository.
“A key feature of Vanderbilt that really helped us was the ability to add in userdefined fields because we needed to have our own unique key,” he said.
Another key part of the SMS integration, according to Wydner, was the fact that his team could specify a set of areas within the facility and create access rules based on those sections, which allowed the system to clear the most technically demanding challenge presented by the project—integrating with the facility’s data management solution.
Interoperability with Other Software Platforms Critical
The SMS system was but one part of a larger solution installed at Austin Hall to accomplish a much more ambitious goal: to have a completely interoperable access and room reservation system. To accomplish this, Wydner and his team installed the Vanderbilt VI Connect Data Management Engine (DME). VI Connect would integrate data from SMS, along with several other enterprise software solutions employed at the facility, including an event management system from Dean Evans and an enterprise resource-planning platform from Ellucian.
“We didn’t know quite where to begin,” Wydner said. “We knew that we needed to get all of the user data—our faculty, staff members and students. We needed some way of defining who is taking a college business class and which system we were going to pull that out of, whether that’s going to be our central student repository, active directory or if we were going to go off of Salesforce.”
This article originally appeared in the November 2015 issue of Security Today.