Grosvenor Technology’s Janus Enterprise system is at the heart of the University of Salford’s new One Card project, which allows students and staff access to a wide range of buildings and services throughout the campus. The One Card project was conceived in 2011 when the university developed its high-tech digital learning, teaching and research campus in Manchester.
Grosvenor Technology's Janus access system is at the heart of the University of Salford's new one-card project, which allows students and staff to access a wide range of buildings and services throughout the campus. The project was conceived in 2011 when the university developed its high-tech digital learning, teaching and research campus in Manchester.
When a student enrols, specific details of their program are uploaded to the system where an access profile is attached to the student's profile, granting them access to their distinct learning areas. Upon enrolment, the student's photo, if not already available, is captured by the card services bureau and uploaded in real time to a central store for access by other university databases and services.
"Grosvenor was pivotal in successfully bringing together several key strategies into a 'one card fits all' solution," said Derek Drury, CIO for Information Services at the university. "It is one of the most complex implementations…touching multiple systems across the campus." The system is a distributed, fault-tolerant solution and interfaces to card readers via its intelligent door controllers located at each access point. Each controller is a stand-alone unit that controls two doors/locks and interfaces to a wide range of card readers and lock mechanisms. Every card profile associated with an intelligent door controller is downloaded to the controller to ensure continued operation even in the event of a network or power failure.
The university has used the system in its campus buildings for more than eight years, with more than 300 card readers providing site-wide access control, and has helped speed up the registration and card personalization each year. The system's backward compatibility ensures interoperability among new and existing hardware.
The biggest challenge for the project was to get all the third-party integrations to use a single unique credential, a Mifare contactless smart card. To achieve this, multiple methods of student identification from the single card are required across all the platforms, including the internally AES-encrypted number, a 56-bit smart card unique ID, a 32-bit classic Mifare emulation, and encoded magstripe and printed barcode. Each of these components are captured at the time of card personalization and made available for each system in real time.