Subscriber Discussion

The Best VMS To Choose For Extensive Customization/Integration?

CD
Chris Dearing
Nov 26, 2013

After reading Horace's lament about the state of seamless integretion between survelience and access control, or lack thereof, i can't help but think that there must be many one-off super solutions that have been created custom.

What VMS package is the best to use when looking to rip it apart?

Are any sold with this in mind?

Side note:

Normally if a customer develops at great expense a in-house solution, say CRM or some such, it is treated as a proprietery, competitive asset.

But does any company really view their security systems this way? Maybe retailers?

C

SP
Sean Patton
Nov 26, 2013

I know that officially or maybe it's unofficially but Stanley Security did this with Genetec for all/most of the prisons (or whatever they are called up there) in Canada.

I know John doesn't like these statements, but I haven't been too involved with Genetec's SDK program personally, but I can tell you from looking at the activity on the Genetec GTAP User Forums in the SDK area, its very busy and active place. At any given time there are half a dozen App programmers discussing different features and functions of their own in-house built interfaces.

So I certainly can't say it is the best; but I have to imagine that it's really high on the list.

CD
Chris Dearing
Nov 27, 2013

Thanks Sean, ill check it out.

Is the middleware for Genetec SOAP or ejb's or Tibco or something more banal like compiled c dll's?

P.S. As for John I wouldn't be concerned; he runs his forum workflow with the -skip Dearing flag set to true. And I don't blame him!

JH
John Honovich
Nov 27, 2013
IPVM

This is an interesting topic. A few general thoughts:

It's uncommon for people to do extensive customizations / integrations. In the physical security world, sending video from a VMS to an access control system is considered fancy. And the favorite customization is "I am a big integrator. I won't sell your stuff unless you customize our logo on your client interface."

To the extent that people do customizations / development on top of VMSes, Genetec and Milestone are the most common that I have seen. I have not spent much time looking on their technical details so I can't comment there. One thing worth noting on Milestons is that there seems to be a fair amount of UI customization via plug-ins (here's Genetec's SDK overview page and Milestone's SDK overview page).

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