We’re looking at Acre and Gallagher for 3 office buildings with multiple tenants across the site.

We’re working with an integrator that supports both, so at this point we’re really trying to decide between the two rather than add more platforms to the shortlist.

Tenant turnover is pretty constant, and there are always new starters and authorized users being added, so the big thing is how easy the system is to manage when people and companies move in and out and access needs changing across shared and tenant only areas.

Both look capable enough from the outside. I’m more interested in which one is less painful to live with once you’re dealing with changes every week.

Anyone who’s used either would be great to hear from.

Have a site, customer PM went rogue, had their contractor bring another integrator in to bid against us. We have contracts, preferred pricing and related.

This "national integrator" vendor won the bid, primarily because they were "significantly cheaper". Find out they're not certified nor qualify to purchase materials, they're using a loophole through parent company.

Just found out they're also not licensed in the states they claim.

Customer's IT refused this vendor access to system, programming or credentials because they're not certified. Have to pay us for all programming.

First phase, 2022, they sent over programming sheets, the job engineering their EC quit during it. Essentially a design-build, nothing they engineered ended up on the panels or ports they designated.

Everything was deemed a programming error by them during commissioning. Proven multiple times they were bullshitting. Also their sequence of operations was proven to not function, bad engineering.

Same MO each phase. Cue this year, same thing, same accusations. Finally got a support case logged, vendor said their claims were BS and their engineering would never function. Apps engineering also concurred, no white paper or tech note since unsupported

Sent that over, with the case info and told them to refer to the manuals and documentation because we obviously know they can't call for support and get all the details. They started arguing against those findings.

Continue on, they now claim with nothing connected the hardware is doing random things, it's obviously programming.

Mind you, the hardware has diagnostics and a LCD display that will show reads and I/O changes in real time. Took me 30 seconds. Their I/O is triggering the panel 4X per minute. Simple. Diagnostics or a meter could've found that, but again it's our programming errors

I've been less than pleasant after 4 years of this, basic troubleshooting and it's not my scope, yet always my blame and task to prove innocence.

When do you go scorched earth? What is too far? Ask for their VAR to be pulled as a vendor? Report them to the state licensing boards? Bill heavily for all this work and ask for a hefty PO?

We are putting door strikes for hostel bedroom doors, we are getting the bedroom door levers with no locks on them

If the strike gets stuck in the lock position, how can we get in the room if a reboot of system doesnt fix it?

The facility is concrete block and we are making the doors flush with the wall, currently constructing facility now

Just to preface, our company uses AccessIt! for access control, coupled with Mercury door controllers installed on-site.

Over this last summer, we went through a complete network overhaul from the ground up. Ever since then, I’ve had a weird issue with our access control systems where a good majority of our mercury controllers will remain off-line in a failed communication status after any kind of loss of their network connection.

This means that anytime we have power outages, or the network engineer decides that switches need to be reset for updates, or someone accidentally unplugged the switch, doors go off-line and will not reconnect to the server until I manually go unplug them and plug them back in. I cannot even send reset commands through our software, because it shows failed communications and won’t go through.

This never happened before the network reset, so my question is what could cause this type of behavior?

Also, to put it into perspective, we have well over 70 controllers across 13 sites, and this is happening everywhere. There are a few exceptions where some of them will come back online correctly, but the majority of the time, they stay off-line anytime a switch is rebooted.

While I would love to get paid to drive around and manually reset these boards all the time, the truth of it is, it is extremely aggravating, and I feel like I’m running in circles on a wild goose chase when I have tons of other things that I need to get done.

Hey all!

I have been working on a project recently to interact directly over a TCP layer with the NET2 Plus to be able to query the unit, be informed of card attempts, open door commands etc. This would remove the requirement for a Net2 Server as well as Windows Server setup.

Once I have come out of POC stage, I would be happy to push to a public repo for you to consume and do as you wish.

Halfway through my 10 door DSX to Brivo conversion. Project manager didn't price lock output power supplies, so still using the DSX lock power supplies. Swapped one panel today. Doing the other tomorrow. Tidy my wires up. Put some new batteries in and another job done!

For those installing access control systems, what's the biggest headache you run into on a typical installation? Wiring, networking, programming, or something else?

We have a single door access co-working business space. Our current hardware is Mercury LP1501-E and ADC-AC-ET25 (yes, we are currently using alarm.com). We tried to make this work, even knowing that alarm.com does not allow any third-party integrations, but it's too restrictive even on their app to customize what we need. 

We are using the Archie App, which has native integrations for certain systems (like Brivo and Kisi), but also a 'custom door access' integration that allows webhooks (basically acting as its own 3rd party API). I’m also familiar with Zapier.

Ideally, I’m trying to find a solution that does not require replacing all of the hardware (open to changing up the reader -but the owner actually prefers PIN codes to phone access). We need something that can be integrated with Archie because clients can buy day passes and need a one time pin issued automatically… same for events operating after typical hours.

Since this is a one door, ~30 users per month (plus occasional randomized codes), I don’t want something that is overkill or super expensive per month. I’ve been recommended Genea and Feenic if we want to keep hardware (but unsure of pricing structure as I’m seeing conflicting info), and UniFi for replacing hardware (at a lower cost, but not having huge monthly fees).

Anyone have any thoughts? I’ve put out some feelers locally, but this place has been a wealth of knowledge, so I wanted to ask here as well. Thanks!

Need to add elevator emergency phone call monitoring to a bid. I got a 2 wire phone in the elevator cab going back to elevator equipment room. Any idea what I can install in the equipment room so that the elevator phone can call out with voice over cell or VOIP?

Hi all, I am helping a family member with their intercom for their building. It has 6 apartments.

They currently have Akuvox installed as an app based intercom. It's been installed for a few years now but there have been some issues. The cost per month for the 6 apartments is $150 - is this reasonable? After looking on google I think this is on the higher side but I could be mistaken.

We have to constantly contact the "distributer" for any changes to users and to create/delete accounts. We also can't pay online and this distributer insists on getting the cc info via phone or text to process payment. Currently we have opted for reoccurring payments and have asked for a link to pay with an invoice. The distributer was annoyed but said he could do that.

When we asked for access to users they said that it would cost more money per month for that access.

Akuvox and their website aren't very helpful. Has anyone had experience changing their distributer? The intercom is fine, we just want to deal with someone else moving forward and the intercom cost a bit over 1k to install, so we'd like to keep it for a bit longer if possible.

I need some recommendations for a card printer for around 1000 card printed/day. The cards do not need nfc or mag stripes on them. The cards will have the design pre-printed I just need to print a name onto the card. In the future it may be nice if it could print the design onto the card as well, the design is in colour.

thank you all in advanced

I randomly got this from someone idk if it’s worth anything

Need to mount an HID 5355 outdoors, trying to figure best kind of box/coverplate to weatherproof it. Ideas, anyone done this? Thx

Anyone have any experience with the Isonas R-1-MCT-W reader? Looking to replace an old Honeywell OP95 with something the reads HID cards and we can use BT LE from a mobile device. Our supply vendor recommended this one but seems pricey at $545 USD.

We’re running AccessIt! v12.2.0 - I’m having a hell of a time getting an MP-1502 controller to connect to the server. The controller is running firmware v2.10.0.

I was on the phone with support, who pulled logs and found that the board is throwing RX Errors (which he said pointed to network issues).

I’ve checked cabling, and all is well there. We’ve even bypassed the cabling and wired it directly to the switch using a known-good patch cable, but that didn’t help.

Firewall / filtering was brought up, but we have 45+ other controllers online and working fine on the same networks, so I couldn’t see that being the issue.

I’ve confirmed my network and host config, and can ping the board from both my computer and the server. I read somewhere that running newer firmware can cause AccessIt! and the MP-1502 to get stuck in a firmware update loop. Or version of AccessIt! apparently expects the MP boards at firmware v2.4, and doesn’t like anything newer like the v2.10 running in this one, though I was able to get one up and online last week running v2.61 without issue 🤷🏼‍♂️

EDIT ** The issue was actually that we had an LP-1502 somewhere else with the same IP that was having issues with a failing NIC and couldn’t be pinged. When selecting the IP for this new installation, we pinged them address and couldn’t find anything, and so assumed it was not in use. Changing the IP resolved the issue entirely - however, tech support did say there is a known bug with AccessIt! v12.2.0 that causes firmware update loops on MP series boards running anything newer than v2.61, and so, if needed, you can disable automatic updates to SCP’s on your server settings (in AccessIt! under ‘servers’) and they will resolve the looping. In my case, although that’s what it seemed to be doing, the IP conflict was indeed the only issue. It seems to be running fine now with our MP-1502 running firmware v2.10.0.

We’re looking at cleaning up a setup across a few buildings and I’m curious how people here approach this. Right now cameras and door access are basically their own worlds. Both workk but anytime there’s an incident we end up pulling information from one system to see who badged in and another system to find the corresponding footage. It’s not a huge problem day to day but it feels unnecessarily clunky once you’re managing multiple buildings.

For people who have worked with both setups, is there much benefit to having video and access control in the same platform? Or do you prefer keeping them separate so you’re not locked into one vendor for everything?

Mostly interested in what works better operationally not just what looks cleaner on a demo.

I'm genuinely curious about them as a company. They've courted me a bunch of times.

There's a few branches around me and they've gone from being franchises to corporate owned. Considering their google reviews were made by their employees factually and easily verified via linkedin 🙄

I've heard horror stories from our vendor's reps.

I've also noticed a vacuum when it comes to their designs and skills as an integrator.

Anyone care to share their experiences on the inside as an employee or done projects with them.

Looking around at options for single door controllers and stumbled upon the powered by genetec Axis a1210 units. Out of curiosity, is it possible to use a standard a1210 either directly or through a cloudlink or does it need to be pre-loaded with synergis?

Hi All,

Not sure if this is the proper sub to ask this but here it goes.

My condominium association wants to annually change the code due to strangers randomly accessing our building but wants to avoid the fee associated with it (160€).

Can we change the code ourselves? Without any knowledge on the subject? We have the factory access code, given by the building contractor.

Picture of the access control system.

We are looking to add an intercomm system for our gates. So far one vendor is recommending Akuvox or Bas-IP. I see Akuvox show up here in searches but nothing shows for Bas-IP. Anyone have experience with both of these and can give some insights as to which is better/more reliable?

Hi all,

Question - would you use a biometric reader for managing your visitors?

- type of biometrics doesn't matter; let's assume facial (as everything else feels outdated)

- type of building - I'd be interested to find out what you think (and can/are willing to use) about any type of building - office, lab, data center, etc.

Also - would you use the wider product ecosystem around a biometric reader (i.e. its 'backend portal' for instance) for visitor management in general? Or you'd prefer a strictly visitor management product for that (i.e. Acre's TDS, Envoy, etc.)

PS Budgeting - what are you currently paying for visitor management? Do you love it, hate it or can sort of live with it?