A Smarter Way to Transition State Government from Proprietary to Open

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.