Global cardholders, one card, managed from a single point…

As we have increasingly established our presence within the access control space, we're being asked to enhance our Synergis access control platform to manage cardholders across several remote and independent sites.  Not a common feature for smaller systems but a definite requirement for larger multi-campus deployments.

The ultimate goal is simple... streamline cardholder management across sites.  Often times, organizations with facilities around the country or the world (eg. multinationals) want to manage cardholders from a central location.  They also want to seamlessly share cardholder info across sites.

To meet this growing need, we have developed Global Cardholder Management, a new feature available in Security Center. Remote sites, each with their own Directory, can synch cardholder data back to a central site; data can also be synced to other remote sites. Another supported scenario is cardholders can be created centrally and synced to remote sites. So you can now manage cardholders centrally, assign a single card per employee, centralized data entry and share data between sites.

Some of the key functionalities include a new role called the Global Cardholder Synchronizer role. It runs on remote sites and connects back to a central server. Data that can be synchronized include cardholders, cardholder groups, custom fields, credentials, and badge templates.

Another concept is that of a global partition. At the central site, you simply check a box called "Global partition" for every partition that is considered global or accessible to multiple remote sites.  It essentially allows remote Global Cardholder Synchronizer roles to connect to that partition and grab the entities within it. By simply adding entities to that partition, they will be synced (or replicated) to a remote site. Remote changes will also find their way to the central site.

If you are interested in learning more about Security Center 5.1's new features, I invite you to consult our sneak peek, which contains quick links to other posts and content about these new additions to our unified security platform.