Administrators at a school in the southern region of the U.S. were stressing out over the failure of its access control system to launch. The dealer had attempted multiple times to restore the access control on campus but was not able to get the system up and running. Desperate, they needed expert technical help. They made the call to Open Options Tech Support.

“They explained they were not able to get DNA Fusion to launch and the site had been having issues for a long while,” said Nic Robran, Technical Support Manager, Open Options. “They got connected with our Tech Support supervisor Zack, who immediately took steps to get remoted into their system, so he could jump on the problem.”

The Open Options Tech Support expert diagnosed the issue rapidly: the DNA driver could not start because not only was the system hard drive full, but the DNA Fusion database was full as well. The first action he took was to address the large database size to free up room on the system drive. He noticed the transaction log was sitting at 188GB as SQL was set to full recovery and the limit was not set on the transaction log, which allowed it to balloon to that size.

He set the recovery mode to simple, limited the transaction log to prevent overgrowth, and then he executed the shrink command via SQL on the log files. This reduced it down to just 16MB, which gave much more free space on the system drive. He then got them set up for archiving, which also assists in keeping the database from getting too large.

“His actions and settings allowed the DNA driver to start, and they were able to launch DNA Fusion,” explained Robran. “Since those settings were not set correctly, that is why they had been having ongoing issues with DNA Fusion. Zack’s SQL expertise groomed their system to be more efficient and will prevent them from having further issues with database overgrowth.”

After he completed his configuration changes, he added more value for the customer at the school by creating a backup of their database. He increased the functionality and reliability of DNA Fusion as well as increased PC resources available to ensure, going forward, the system would not get bogged down.

An integrator had the challenge to convert the access control in a building with 12 doors and two elevators in a short window of time but did not have the experience with DNA Fusion that is needed to make the conversion successful. Instead of risking missteps, misunderstandings and delays, the integrator called Professional Services at Open Options to supplement and support their work.

The project was to convert an existing PremiSys system to DNA Fusion for an improvement in access control. The integrator had not set up the original access control system, so they were not familiar with how the doors and windows were hooked up. But Open Options Professional Services demonstrated its expertise in access control to recognize how the hardware from the old system was being utilized and how it needed to be replicated in DNA Fusion.

Before the Professional Services technician even went on site at the end-user location, he obtained a copy of the PremiSys database from the integrator and began converting as much of the database as possible. He was able to import the customer’s existing hardware. He was also able to get access levels and elevator information, along with cardholder information, converted to a DNA Fusion database. In brief, he was able to install the state-of-the-art Open Options software and attach the converted database for the customer to review.

Once on site, the Open Options technician worked with the integrator collaboratively to bring all the hardware and doors online in DNA Fusion, moving the end-user’s access control software away from their old system. “For the most part, the software cutover went smoothly. We were able to get all the doors online and create card formats that worked with the cards we had for testing. That is, until we got to the elevators, which were a challenge because the floors were not matching up with what we had programmed,’ said John Hubbard, a Professional Services representative at Open Options.

It was believed that the old system had the elevators programmed in a way that would allow the customer to see what floor was selected when a person used their card in the elevator. However, the team figured out that this feature was not being used. Triggers and macros were being used in the software to allow the customer to hit a button at the front desk in the lobby to allow a visitor to select a floor in the elevator without using a card. Once the team figured this out, they were able to resolve the issues and turn the system over to the customer.

“Because of the on-site professional services provided by Open Options, the integrator was able to get this job completed in less time for the end-user customer than if they tried to do this on their own,” said Hubbard. “The integrator sent us an email about how impressed he was with the on-site support and how fast we responded to the small issues that came up, acknowledging how we were there every step of the way for them with this project.” It’s the Open Options way.