With over two thousand five hundred door controllers currently installed and a yearly growth of over two hundred and fifty units, access control is a major contributing factor in the success of the timeware® workforce management system.
Access control sales account for around 30% of timeware’s® yearly turnover: In simple terms, access control is an extremely important module and is seen as a standard part of the core product by the timeware® development team.
timeware® has a long history of access installations: the first versions in the early 1990’s had limited options and provided a simple door release when an employee ‘swiped’ their mag-stripe ID badge. By the late 90’s a dedicated access control terminal was developed and extended compatibility to the major proximity readers of the time. The access terminal provided good service throughout the 00’s until the development team looked at shelving all EPROM based PCBs in favour of a more versatile flash based design.
The flash based v9 access unit was in effect a prototype design developed for the MURCO project in conjunction with Wisegrove Ltd and this was quickly superseded by the v10 design in 2009.
Although the v10 has undergone many firmware upgrades over the past few years, the hardware design has remained constant and provided timeware® with an extremely reliable access control platform.
Access control installations...
Although the majority of access installations are based in single locations with terminals sitting on a LAN, there are an increasing number of wide area installations with access (and attendance) terminals based in separate locations, often hundreds of miles from the server or data centre. Two of the larger installations include Ecobank in Ghana with eighty three access terminals at twenty eight separate locations and the IAC Group based in the Midlands (UK) with eight locations containing over seventy access door controllers. Although the very large sites are rare, customers with up to ten access controllers are now quite common and the support teams report that they perform error free 24-7, 365 days of the year!
