The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a global center for teaching, learning and research, consistently ranked among the top 20 public universities in the world and recently recognized as North America’s most international university. With a daytime population of 75,000 the campus thrives with student life, but its security system needed to be updated to handle the rigors of a modern educational environment.
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The advantages of unifying access control and intruder detection into a single platform are obvious. It has simplified design, increased user friendliness, decreased service issues, and improved situational awareness for Campus Security.
John Molnar
Access Services Manager at UBC
UBC’s challenge was to find a unified enterprise solution that wouldn’t compromise its 24/7 security operation and allowed it to scale as the campus continues to grow. The university needed a seamless integration of services that provided safety and was unobtrusive to students, but could work at scale to meet growing demand.
Keeping students and staff safe is a top priority in any educational environment. This job was made harder by the separate platforms UBC was using for access control and alarms. Shortcomings of their legacy system, were also top of mind as John Molnar, Access Services Manager at UBC, and his team set out to find a solution that would minimize risks and provide a clear picture of what is happening on campus.
“We needed to migrate towards a technology that wasn’t simply the latest revision of an antiquated platform,” says Molnar. This made the provider decision “critically important.”
After investigating multiple options, Molnar and his team chose ICT. Using Protege GX as the heart of a large-scale enterprise solution enabled integration of alarms, student management and other campus systems, and Armor IP alarm reporting. This would provide Molnar and his team with a real-time, 360-degree view of the campus, and enable them to respond quickly to any issues that might arise.
The first instances of ICT product on campus were large scale installations of Protege GX during construction of the high-profile Pharmaceutical Sciences and Earth Sciences institutional research buildings in 2012. “It was imperative that the electronic access and security systems be operational for occupancy,” Molnar says. “With ICT’s support, this was achieved.”
UBC was in the unique position of being self-installers with their 9 strong team on campus. This meant that all staff had to be brought up to speed with the equipment and provided with training to facilitate the early stages of installation.
“ICT provided support through the steepest part of our learning curve,” says Molnar. “The technical certification process really helped our staff gain a thorough understanding of ICT’s hardware and software products.”
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This confidence has seen the partnership between UBC and ICT progress from these two original sites to an ongoing multi-year relationship that now encompasses 115 buildings, over 2,300 doors, and more than 50,000 card holders across the campus. As well as using lockdown, smart reader, and camera call up functionality, they have also recently integrated access control of more than 50 elevators with Protege GX, giving an even more unified system. In addition, UBC has been able to save 70% of highly valuable wall space thanks to the compact design of ICT’s DIN Rail hardware.
Even with the partnership now over a decade old, Protege GX continues to deliver a future-proofed solution. It allows for easy expansion alongside the growth of UBC, ensuring the safety of students and staff for years to come.
Image credits: Don Erhardt & Paul H. Joseph - UBC Brand & Marketing, via Flickr
