Connecting Hundreds of New Doors to Access Control during the COVID-19 Pandemic

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.