Vanderbilt security management system provides access control at Oregon State University

Oregon State University relies on Vanderbilt’s SMS to provide access control for 100,000-square-foot Austin Hall

Vanderbilt Industries, a global leader in the delivery of innovative, highly reliable technologies that help organisations ensure safety and security, recently announced that Oregon State University relies on Vanderbilt’s Security Management System (SMS) to provide access control for its 100,000-square-foot Austin Hall.

The state-of-the-art facility for students and faculty members houses 21 project rooms, 10 classrooms, 10 faculty conference rooms, IT closets, a four-room research suite, a mailroom and an assortment of event spaces. Opened in 2014, the school needed a way to integrate building access control into a single data management solution that not only enabled school officials to streamline ingress and egress, but also allowed students to reserve one of the project rooms by using their existing credentials.

The solution

The solution needed to work with existing HID Global identification cards used by students across campus, as well as an easy-to-access user repository. The Vanderbilt SMS solution supports the existing HID credentials and easily integrates to the university’s housing allocation solution, enabling the facility to achieve new levels of control over access privileges.

“We knew that we needed to retrieve a wealth of user data – our college’s faculty, staff members, plus the entire student body – all from disparate systems,” said Kirk Wydner, Operating Systems Network Analyst for the College of Business, Oregon State University. “Vanderbilt and Swiftdata Technology helped us address this issue by offering a solution that pulls information from a variety of systems into one, easy-to-use program that integrates directly with the access control devices in Austin Hall. Without this ability, data would have to be manually entered into several systems, opening the university up to potential data errors and room access issues. The Vanderbilt solution helped us avoid these potential problems.”

SMS access control technology

Wydner and his team installed the Vanderbit VI-Connect Pinwheel Data Management Engine (DME) from SwiftData Technology to work with Vanderbilt’s SMS system, which would integrate data from the SMS along with other enterprise software solutions deployed at the facility, including the Dean Evans event management system. The Vanderbilt SMS system has a unique way of combining the access levels of students and staff members with their respective rights and privileges through a process known as nesting, which enabled OSU to use the system in a way that others have not in the past.

Vanderbilt’s SMS solution delivers a powerful, single source for integrating a facility’s access control technologies, digital video and alarm monitoring services. Perfect for a large institution such as OSU, it supports an unlimited number of cardholders and readers, and provides unparalleled flexibility.

“The main thing that our faculty and students enjoy about the integration is that they can just walk up to a project room or a meeting room, and tap their OSU ID on the Schlage lock. It then opens up, lets them in and it also gives them an automatic one-hour reservation on the room,” Wydner said.

Upon completion of the installation, the Vanderbilt team provided OSU officials with in-depth training of the SMS solution. “The Vanderbilt team did a great job covering all of the bases and making sure we had the information down pat before handing the system over to us,” Wydner said.