One of the many new products and developments launched by IndigoVision at the recent IFSEC 2008 show was the latest upgrade to ‘Control Center', the company's IP Video and alarm management software. The upgrade, due for release at the end of May, enhances the alarm handling capabilities with features that help improve efficiency and response times when dealing with incidents. IndigoVision's complete IP Video and alarm management system is an open-architecture solution that can provide true integration with other security systems such as alarm systems, access control and intruder detection. The benefits of integrating systems together can be significant, allowing the user to trigger operations in one system from events generated in another. There are many advantages to consolidating the alarms in the CCTV system, as it is the operator interface most used of all the security systems. Release 3.10 of ‘Control Center' incorporates many new alarm management features including Alarm Groups, Cascaded Alarms and Looped Replay on Alarm. The new Alarm Groups feature allows the end user to designate groups of monitors or video panes for alarm display only. Each group can be configured to display different types of alarms, such as from access control or intruder systems. Within each group alarms can be cascaded or queued in the monitors or video panes. The Looped Replay on Alarm feature further demonstrates how incident response can be improved with good alarm handling. When an alarm is raised, for example from a forced door in an access control system, live video from the camera monitoring that door is automatically displayed next to a looped replay of recorded video from the same camera. The looped video is displayed for a pre-determined time either side of the incident. The operator can then instantly see the cause of the alarm and monitor the live situation. These new alarm features allow ‘Control Center' to operate in what is known as a "black" or "dark" screen monitoring mode, where video is only displayed on alarm. This method of operation is recognised as providing a more efficient operator environment that leads to quicker incident response. | 
