Problems with the traditional password / barcode & smart card systems

Security

Businesses, such as banks, financial institutes & law firms, must control employees' access to the business premises, and must ensure that the individual is actually the authorized person.   Other business sectors, like manufacturers, also want to keep track of the attendance records of their employees & workers. 

Today, business use a variety of security systems to achieve the purposes, such as the traditional systems that use passwords or security access cards.  However, there is simply no foolproof way to make these traditional systems completely safe from unauthorized intrusion. Passwords & ID badges can be stolen, and users can give their passwords & badges to others, resulting in a system that is far too open to far too many people.

Setup & Maintenance

These traditional security systems are usually complicated to setup and maintain, especially for larger-scale security systems that involve more than one security terminals inter-connected together to form a completed system.

In general, all the existing security systems in the market today require dedicated computers connecting to the systems to setup and maintain the systems (e.g., new enrollment, withdrawal & other changes of employees' data).  The dedicated computer must be a PC, running Microsoft Windows 95 / 98 / NT for example, and must be running the special software provided by the vendor of the security systems.  Such proprietary software packages are platform-dependent, and other less-common computer platforms, such as Apple Macintosh & Unix machines, usually cannot do the job due to the lack of support from the vendor.

The setup & maintenance of the dedicated computers, the connections, and the proprietary software are cumbersome & require specialized knowledge to use effectively, and takes a lot of expensive IT times.   Also, the additional costs of these dedicated computers and software are expensive.

Difficult to access the Information

Besides the problems associated with the setup & maintenance of these traditional systems, it is also difficult and inconvenient for users to access the information of the security systems, such as the access log & the attendance records of the employees.  In general, a typical security system only generates and sends raw data to the dedicated computer, in a form of simple line-by-line listing of the access log of all individuals in chronological order, in plain ASCII format.  Only the dedicated computer can download and collect this raw data.  Other computers cannot access the data.  The raw data yet needs another software package to convert the raw data into useful and meaningful information for the management purpose (e.g., to get the attendance report for an individual of a particular month), and the package is not typically integrated with the software that is used to setup & maintain the security system.  Again, this additional software package can only be installed and run on the dedicated computer connected to the security system.

And in order for other users in the company to access the information over the corporate computer network (e.g., when the users in the administration department prepare the payroll), the company may need to develop special software to allow other computers to access the information.  This again is cumbersome and costs a lot of expensive IT times, and the information collected in this manner is not real-time data as it is not collected directly from the security system, and there is usually a time delay.  Users are usually left to guess if the informaiton is accurate & up-to-date or not.