CBORD Access Control

Like you point out, CBORD tends to have a niche in education, where they pair access with a number of other software modules like hospitality/cafeteria ticket management and student enrollment.

Integration city wide is not a good fit for CBORD. They don't have integration options typically required in these deployments.

I am not sure why they insist on using it for the City. The only thing I can think of is that the City probably services (fire, police, ems) the campus and this may make card deployment easier rather than include a step to put public safety responders into the CBORD system for physical access. It is possible that the University IT also supports City IT.

We have a University client that had an RFP for access control (2012?), and decided to go with Banner, which was the company that provided their student database, etc. system. Reports since, the last couple of years, is that it is a nightmare with limited features and support and a horrible user interface experience. We provided a solution for the RFP which would poll/integrate with the database. They had no confidence in this, so went with the Banner solution. We can not integrate Banner with the campus wide IP video solution.

CBORD works great has a lot of features but they will also let you/ help you write custom add-ons if you have a big enough check book.

their (swipe)readers tend to wear out rather quick but its a rather solid system other wise.

mainly CBORD is good for places with insanely high turn overs like colleges or government or places with lots of visitors .

it does however not integrate well with video. you integrate it with video though......

As mentioned above, CBORD is primarily a campus-oriented back-end system for student records, payments, and a host of other things -- in the same vein as Blackboard and Banner.

Some universities get sold on one of these solutions, and I've yet to speak with a single one yet (and I've spoken to dozens that have it) that doesn't regret it and regularly look for ways out of it.

The reality is that it's NOT an enterprise-level access control system, so for any sizable or growing university, it's typically a bad deal for them.

The main thing to remember is that there are multiple systems that can integrate seamlessly with the CBORD/Banner-type systems to make credential management, tie-ins with the physical credential (i.e. student ID being used for both access control and payments), and the back-end administrative piece much simpler.

In my personal opinion, there is a never a valid reason to go with one of these types of systems other than cost. Go with an actual access control platform that can integrate with these systems (Lenel and Software House, to name a few) and you'll be much better off at the end of the day.

There are a dozen other options you can propose other than CBORD that will be much better and likely cost-competitive to what CBORD is offering when you actually compare features.