15 years ago city officials in Edmonton, the capital of Alberta, Canada, wanted an electronic access control system that could help protect dozens of municipal facilities while being monitored from one central location. They went to a local security dealer to purchase and install equipment in about 50 sites, including maintenance yards, swimming pools and ice skating arenas.

Once the installation began, “there were a bunch of little things going wrong,” says Rick Wright, electrical supervisor for Edmonton's Asset Management and Public Works Department. “The people doing the work weren't properly trained and were making some guesses. Unfortunately, they often guessed wrong. We really wanted to make the system work. We could see there were obvious advantages in having it.”

A host of problems plagued the system at a number of the sites. Installation problems were common and it soon became obvious the entire system itself was slow and becoming outdated even before it was up and operating reliably.

For years, the city tried to make the best of a bad situation, but eight years after the original installations began, several city officials considered abandoning the virtually non-functional project entirely.

Still convinced the idea was sound, city officials made one final attempt at acquiring the reliable, citywide system they wanted. But with neither municipal employees nor Edmonton-area security vendors familiar with the newer systems available, the city turned to a systems integrator to implement the project.

Antar-Com Inc. (ACI), a White Plains, N.Y.-based systems integrator, was selected to handle the job. After studying the situation, ACI switched Edmonton to a new access system, a C•CURE 1 Plus from Lexington, Mass.-based Software House. The team also wrote system installation standards and then trained city employees on system administration.

“We worked with the city's electricians to enable them to successfully install and troubleshoot card readers, monitor points, control points and intrusion zones,” said Isac Tabib, ACI vice president.

The new system worked as expected, and the city was soon adding new sites. Currently, there are about 100 city-owned facilities on the access system. These include city hall and other administrative office space, bus garages, childcare centers and many other city-owned recreation and work sites. The system includes approximately 650 card readers and 5,000 input points.

A private guard service, San Antonio-based Initial Security Co., monitors system activities around the clock from a command center in city hall. In the event of an alarm, guards are dispatched to investigate, and city police are called if necessary. Alarm information is transmitted to the command center via Edmonton's wide area network (WAN) or dial-up modems from sites where the network is not yet available.

Now, about 4,000 of the city's 9,000 employees carry access cards, with that number scheduled to expand when 2,000 transportation workers are added. Some of Edmonton's 650,000 residents also carry cards in order to access recreational facilities.

Last year, the city again called on ACI to help implement a major system upgrade to a hot redundant C•CURE 8000 server environment. The redundant server ensures the access system will continue to function without interruption should the main server fail for any reason. The upgrade involved converting the existing database, installing new servers in separate municipal buildings and partitioning the database for administration by a variety of city entities.

“The process began with a one-week, on-site training session we conducted for the Edmonton staff,” Tabib says. By carefully planning the implementation in advance, we were able to convert more than 60 percent of the existing readers over one weekend. We also created a plan by which Edmonton employees could complete the remaining building conversions in outlying areas over a short period of time and at the convenience of the city and its employees.”

The new system allows authorized city employees to dial into the main access server from laptops in their homes in the event of an alarm. That way, Tabib says, they can troubleshoot the system to determine if the event is something that requires their immediate attention or can wait until they return to work the next day. By using the system, security guards can see more text related to each alarm event, making it easier for them to determine an appropriate response. Wright says Edmonton's five city electricians, who are dedicated to installing and maintaining the access system, are constantly adding new facilities to it.

Edmonton currently has about 530 cameras from San Diego-based American Dynamics in place at city hall, in an underground pedestrian walkway that links two main downtown city buildings, municipal swimming pools, maintenance yards, fire halls and LRT stations along its eight-mile light rail transit system. All cameras are part of stand-alone systems that are monitored on-site.

“It would be nice for our security guards to be able to use the cameras to match a face with the access card being used to gain entry into city facilities,” Wright said. “I think the access control and video integration is something the city will pursue in the future.”