A Safe, Secure and Pleasurable Experience at the University

Managing students, staff and visitors was a key requirement of the university. Therefore, they opted for a secure and flexible solution from SALTO Systems that controls access to stairwells, dormitories, gates and driveways using standard university ID cards.

By: Mihael Pinsone Slanc, Business Development Manager, SALTO Systems; E-mail: m.slanc@saltosystems.com

Clare College is the second-oldest of the Cambridge colleges, with a foundation date of 1326. Located just a short walk from the centre of Cambridge, it is a lively and forward-looking college, with a strong history of academic achievement and a particular reputation for its friendly and unpretentious student community. Student life centres on the elegant seventeenth-century Old Court set in beautiful gardens beside the river in the centre of Cambridge and the twentieth-century Memorial Buildings.

The challenge

The Support Services department at the University of Cambridge needs to allow for simple and secure access to a range of buildings within the campus of the university. When one of the colleges at the university, Clare College, needed to upgrade and modernise its access control arrangements as part of a rolling programme of security improvements throughout the university, the department decided to install a bespoke electronic solution from SALTO Systems to achieve its objectives.

The previous access control system at Clare College was a simple proximity-based installation fitted several years ago to replace the original mechanical lock and key arrangement. However, this was beginning to show its age, both in its limited range of features and by the fact that to add fully online doors with electronic locks as part of the expansion programme would require a hard wired solution that would be prohibitively expensive.

Student, staff and visitor management is crucial for the university and this would be the key application for the new access control system. To achieve it a secure solution was needed to control access via entrances to staircases, student hostels, gateways and driveways using standard issue University ID cards. The college, having already taken the decision to move to the more secure Mifare card technology, needed an access system that was compatible with Mifare, was contactless and which could also provide them with everything that a hard-wired system would deliver but in a mix of online and offline standalone wire free formats and at lower cost too.

Mix of online and offline readers

Local SALTO business partner Cambridge Lock and Safe carried out the installation. One of their prime aims with the new access system was the need to reduce the time needed to manage it, without any loss of functionality, flexibility, control or security.

In order to achieve this it was necessary to consider the college’s requirements from two angles. Since Clare College uses the standard University ID Cards which support the Mifare system, a total of 47 WRM9001 contactless smart card wall readers and CU50ENSVN Control Units was needed. The online readers would then operate via the college’s Local Area Network (LAN) while the offline readers would use the SALTO VIRTUAL NETWORK (SVN).

The SVN system allows the stand-alone locks to read, receive and write information via the University ID cards. Since most access related information is kept encrypted on these cards, the wall readers are able to update and receive information from the cards at any time while from a user’s point of view, the up-dater is just another wall reader. This easy functionality opens up a whole range of possibilities and provides 90% of the benefits of a fully online access control system at the cost of a standalone system.

User movement tracking

The ‘smart’ ID cards build up ‘on-card’ audit trails through normal use enabling the Support Services department to track student, staff and visitor movement through both the offline and online parts of the system if required, and a complete access profile of each individual can be established and updated as necessary at the update wall readers.

Any ID cards that become lost or stolen can be quickly and simply deleted from the system just through visiting the readers with up-dated cards. The system also greatly reduces the number of visits necessary to offline doors, since user data is simply transferred on cards by normal usage. This functionality can revolutionise the traditional problems associated with key control, eliminating the need to replace locks when security is breached due to the loss or theft of an ID card.

Facilitated work of the faculty

Another function of SVN is departmental operation. This allows each faculty at a campus to manage only their own doors and/or users, while certain other doors and users can be simultaneously shared with other faculties, for example main entrance doors etc. This provides maximum security for each faculty with the convenience and flexibility of shared control of main access points.

“It is extremely important to us that students, staff and visitors have a safe, secure and pleasurable experience while at the university. With the installation of the SALTO access control system at Clare College we are confident this will be achieved. Its sophisticated mix of online and offline access control points together with the advantages conferred by the SVN system enable us to manage up to 64,000 users and up to 64,000 doors in a single system if required, making the college both a secure and accessible environment for all its users,” said Peter Johnson from Support Services Department.