A property management company that had a workforce reduction was having trouble logging into DNA Fusion because one of the operators was no longer with the company. Without a password that was required, this existing Open Options customer was in dire need to solve the problem. Their main contact at their dealer, unfortunately, had also left his position. With nowhere else to turn amid all the personnel changes, the end-user turned to the Sales team at Open Option as the ultimate problem-solvers to quarterback a last-minute drive to a resolution.

When the end-user customer attempted to log into DNA Fusion, they received an error message that the SQL database was not connecting. It was a Microsoft issue, not a DNA Fusion issue. The customer initially called into the Tech Support team at Open Options, but a resolution was going to require a coordinated effort across different functions.

The regional sales team at Open Options reached out to the customer and scheduled a WebEx session with the customer and their IT department. The Sales leader also brought in his colleagues from the Tech Support side of Open Options for additional troubleshooting. After they worked on the problem in a collaborative fashion, Open Options was able to access their computer and successfully run the reports that they required. This is comforting during challenging times when changes, including personnel changes, can cause disruptions and create new issues that need a coordinated effort to resolve. Open Options provides access that connects customers to resolutions. This is part of the promise of ConnectCare, which is the next level of customer care, especially useful in times of uncertainty and disruption.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, an end-user customer was required to create security points where temperature checks would be conducted of each employee who is entering certain buildings. A high fever is a sign of possible coronavirus infection at which point the employee is denied access to the building in order to protect other employees. But how does one use an access control system to give or deny access to a building based on a person’s body temperature? Open Options’ Tech Support team had to get creative. 

Although DNA Fusion does a lot, controlling access to a building based on whether a person has a fever or not was a new challenge for Open Options, uniquely reflective of the COVID-19 era. The end user’s dealer contacted Luis Solorzano on the Technical Support team of Open Options for assistance after they were already utilizing anti-passback, which was unable to be further used to accomplish their goals.

The buildings that needed to have this special controlled access, based on monitoring people’s body temperature, did not have any physical barrier that would force personnel working in those buildings to a checkpoint every day. Luis engaged the entire support team at Open Options to find a solution to meet the customer’s needs.

The best solution that could be implemented rapidly, the team agreed, was to have DNA Fusion deactivate the credentials at a set time every day of those people who work in different shifts in those buildings. Then when they return to work, they would need to go through the checkpoint to get their temperature checked and, if cleared, badge in at the checkpoint, which would then re-activate their credentials, so they could proceed into the building.   

“After working out the details to address multiple shifts and only affect certain personnel, instead of de-activating everyone at the company daily, the solution was presented and tested on-site,” said Nic Robran, Technical Support Manager, Open Options.  “Once tested, the customer was very pleased with the solution, and they were able to get the desired function without needing to wait so that they could implement the safety measures for food prep due to the current global crisis.”

State government officials discovered that having a proprietary access control system for their state government has limitations, inefficiencies and lingering drawbacks, surely holding them back. They saw that moving to an open approach for access control was the future. After an evaluation, this state government selected Open Options’ DNA Fusion as the access control platform of choice. 

Like most, this state government started off the new project with Open Options with a very large database, along with many doors on their system. The process of converting their numerous locations and doors over to DNA Fusion, along with tens of thousands of credentials, presented a challenge – but one that the Sales team at Open Options was ready for.

While hardware was being switched out, the state had to keep its existing database until the final switchover to DNA Fusion occurred. Enrolling new users into the legacy system continued to be mandatory during the transition project. At midnight each night, DNA Fusion would accept a database file dump of their entire database, which proved to be very timely and error-prone. 

This is where the Sales team kicked into high gear, bringing their Open Options colleagues in Professional Services and Software Development into the project to come up with a viable solution. 

“Our Engineering and Software Development teams were able to come up with a quick solution change in DNA Fusion,” said Shannon Diddell, Regional Sales Manager at Open Options.  “Instead of downloading the entire database nightly, the Open Options Software Development team was able to write a query that only looked for new entries from the legacy access system every 15 minutes. This allowed the system to accept very few, if any, errors, and it did not bog down the throughput of trying to download tens of thousands of credentials nightly.” 

The state government customer was pleased and able to get a clean database moving forward when the "all-go" switch was turned on with Open Options. 

Commissioning 250 doors between two sites is not an easy task during normal times. Doing it during the COVID-19 pandemic with the widespread stay-at-home orders and restricted physical access to buildings adds another level of complexity. This is the challenge that a large school district in Louisiana had to tackle recently. Yet, despite the new “normal,” Open Options Professional Services provided the support that helped them be successful. 

Facilitating remote access was key to this project to add more than 100 doors each at two different sites to the access control system, bringing the total to 500 doors online. Just like the rest of the world, the system user was mostly working from home and had very limited hours to gain access to the two sites that are over 30 minutes apart from each other. 

“This project required extreme flexibility to accommodate the unique demands of the system user to move around while still providing remote access to the system to help the integrator with the access control install,” said William Murphey, Professional Services & Engineering Manager at Open Options. “Working remotely helped facilitate what was necessary to successfully bring online, program and test 250 new access control doors added to the system.”

The Professional Services team at Open Options remained flexible, indeed, in allowing the system user to move around freely, as needed, from home to office and then back to home. This demonstrated that access control end-user customers can still advance their access control projects forward, despite the pandemic-related shutdown. 

Open Options worked closely with the integrator and system user to remotely assist in configuring and programming the new devices and troubleshooting connectivity issues. 

The site inspection went smoothly. Professional Services made it look easy.