Handheld badge verification ◇ Emergency mustering ◇ Health screening

Click below to see the video:

Video Transcript

David: Hey Chris, good to see you.

Chris: Hi Dave.

David: So there’s a lot of work that our team does in terms of just backend work that is invisible to our end users, that gives XPressEntry a really rock-solid emergency mustering solution. So we’re going to talk about here message queuing technology that you implemented into XPressEntry and how it works to ensure that XPressEntry can always stay up-to-date with what we are doing in the backend access control system. So what actually is the problem that we are seeing in the field?

Chris: A problem we were seeing was people running- locking their database queries when they had a lot of activity coming in. Imagine a whole shift of a few hundred workers coming in. You have several hundred scans within a minute or two right? You end up with the frontend tear dock locking in and potentially if the database isn’t there for an activity to be processed, you might not capture the fact that someone was entering the area. So we were solving for that.

David: And if you have a global customer you could be having records coming in thousands a minute because you’re coming from all over the world.

Chris: Yeah what you really don’t want is one site’s activity to affect another.

David: Sure. Alright, what’s the first thing we’re going to see here?

Chris: We’re gonna run just a bunch of badge scans at one second apart and I’ll hit go so we can start seeing them. And what you should see is that they get sent into the message queue on our left. We see people coming in over here on the device and in the muster view. It’s sort of a lot and the device will lag by a little tiny bit but it keeps up with them now.

David: That’s pretty cool. So you’re getting- this is like somebody going through your gate. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! And the data is coming through XPressEntry and the handhelds get that data not quite as continuously but really close.

Chris: Yeah, I’ll hit stop and we’ll see how long it takes to catch up. Stop… and haha I stopped it right there.

David: What happens if you get the weird cases where somebody gets thousands of activities and your network is down all of a sudden everything catches up at once from the access panels.

Chris: Yeah so we also handle that in the same way here. It also will point out things like software events where people are being changed by a third-party system and some of the access control systems. We could get a thousand card-holder changes at once right? So the ability applies to bulk updates. So this is gonna be a thousand badges. Scan..scan.. Within one second or two seconds on the backend system. We’ll see them pile up over here on our service and we’ll also see them pile up… I also have the data manager queue, the message queue loaded here. So here you go. Hit go and they start coming in really pretty much quicker than we can process them. You can tell that because this queue starts catching them. But we’re able…

David: This is thousands in how long?

Chris: They are in the system now and they are still coming over the wire.

David: Alright. We went through that thousand users and we can now see that the missing.. It matches up Between the XpressEntry server on the desktop and on the handheld. So message queueing seems pretty powerful in terms of making sure you don’t miss any records and that you’re able to keep up with the backend access control systems.

Chris: Yeah! It helps us solve some problems we weren’t able to solve before.

David: That’s pretty great. Alright, Chris. Well thank you very much.

Chris: Alright, talk to you later.

David: Bye.

Back to Top