The Top 5 Ways Universities Confirm Student Identity Through Access Control

By Mitchell Kane, President and GM, Vanderbilt Industries

As students return to school, packing lecture halls and moving into dorm rooms in the colleges and universities, officials behind the scenes look for ways to safeguard the students, faculty, and assets. To accomplish this feat, today’s higher education organizations look for a combination of policies and new technology solutions.

Manufacturers and integrators work diligently to meet the needs of colleges and universities by introducing new and innovative ways for security officials to confirm student identity and control access to key locations. Here are five technology-driven ways universities are meeting these demands:

1. Event Management. With students constantly on the move from one place to another on a college campus, security officials must stay on their toes, finding new ways of granting and restricting access to buildings and classrooms. One new way that security officials are avoiding problems with access control is by integrating event management systems with access control solutions.

For example, Oregon State University sought to create a completely interoperable access and room reservation system in Austin Hall, a state-of-the-art facility that caters to both students and faculty. The university installed Vanderbilt’s Security Management System (SMS) with their Data Management Engine (Vanderbilt’s VI Connect) to integrate data from several other enterprise software solutions including event management software from Dean Evans and an enterprise resource-planning platform from Ellucian. By integrating all of these platforms together, students are now able to reserve rooms and access rooms through a single reservation system, which allows the university to keep tabs on damage or security issues related to this access.

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