The F&S Card Access team keeps campus safe, by changing lock and unlock permissions of individuals on campus. For example, when a new person is hired, they can get in the parts of a building they need to; just as importantly, names and identities can be removed from entrance and exit permissions lists.
The i-card holds all the value, as it is the ‘key’ to entrance in particular places at different times. Below is a Q&A with team members.
Why is it valuable to students/faculty/staff to have doors be accessible through the i-card?
The most important point to get across in everything we say is that in general, we do not accept requests from most students/faculty/staff. To centralize departmental security, every department that adds access controls nominates a limited number of staff members (usually facility managers) to be access control authorizers, and unless we get a request from someone on that list for a building, we either politely redirect it to the list of authorizers or ignore it. Our advice for anyone that’s having a problem getting electronic access to an area is to reach out to the facility manager for the space they need access to.
To be clear, we see the convenience provided to staff and students of being able to use a card for entry instead of a brass key as a knock-on benefit. Our true benefit to the University comes from the fact that electronic access control creates accountability of entry, allows for faster manipulation of area rosters, and allows us to pre-schedule changes to building unlock schedules based on either planned or extemporaneous events, all of this to ensure departmental needs and priorities are being adhered to.
How quickly can someone be added/removed from a door’s accessibility?
Generally, users can be added or removed from access within minutes during operational hours, although this estimate increases during our busiest times of year (semester starts), with the quality of data received, with the complexity of a request, or with any additional requirements for a higher-security space. There are additional background check requirements for spaces that regularly contain minors, and any adds or removes to those spaces are slower because it is our obligation to follow state laws unique to those spaces.
As departments move to Security Expert, we’re working with select facility managers to pilot faster methods of adding or removing users that leverage existing onboarding and offboarding processes that departments must regularly conduct anyway.
What are some recent buildings that now use card access? How has that benefited the building occupants?
Most new capital projects in the last five years have included an element of electronic access control. Some recent buildings that we have added card access to include Agricultural Engineering Science Building, Levis Faculty Center and Engineering Sciences Building. This benefits the building occupants by giving them a sense of security knowing that the building is secure, and only certain users have access to the building.
What’s the future of card access? Just more buildings?
The campus is currently migrating the existing access control systems to Schneider Electric’s product: Security Expert. Moving all of our doors to one system will allow our department to serve the campus more efficiently.
Additionally, we’re working with departments that have previously run their own single-building installations of access control systems to join us on our installation of Security Expert. By combining resources, we can be better stewards of campus resources, and we can make the process of gaining access easier for staff members who need access to many locations because of their job duties.
We’re also working with departments to replace all swipe readers for any of our doors with chip-based readers. We encourage everyone to check the back of their card for the HID/Seos logo to confirm their card will work with the new reader technology!
Beyond that, we’re constantly trying out new technologies in access controls, providing research, development, best practices, and real world testing for campus departments, while holding an extremely high standard for what we can deliver at a high quality level to a campus of over 150,000 users, so we have no product updates to announce at this time.
Are the retinal/fingerprint/temperature scanning features available in any buildings? Which ones? What “types” of buildings?
Temperature scanning features are no longer being used on campus, as many models of temperature scanners were found to be unreliable for production environments. Now that the campus is back to pre-pandemic levels of health monitoring, we have no intention to reintroduce this feature on campus.
There are multiple brands of biometric-factor scanners being used on campus, primarily in environments that require additional security for operational or grant compliance reasons. The most important thing to note about all of our biometric-factor scanners is that scanners are only being installed in partnership with departments. The partnership is paramount because current policy has the onus of BIPA compliance on the hosting department. We’re happy to discuss future biometric installs with any interested facility managers, but we’ll be holding any future installations to that same standard.