February 2020
Intrusion:
Force Alarm
Currently, if any IPS Point is active you are prevented from arming the IPS Group. You get a message that there is an active point and that you need to address this before you can arm the zone. The new feature will give you the option to force the arming of the Zone. What will happen is that all IPS Points that are not active will be armed, the points that are active will be bi-passed. When the points are no longer active they will be added to the armed zone.
User Story
- You need to manually arm your building at 17:00 each night. One of the IPS points is a perimeter door to the meeting hall. This door is currently open when an event crew is setting up the meeting hall. Because the door is open you are being prevented from Arming the rest of the building. You can now use this new force feature to arm the building and when the event crew is done they shut the door, IPS Point no longer active, and it will be added armed points. Security no longer has to wait for the meeting hall door to be closed or remember to re-arm the zone when the door is closed.
- Note: If in the scenario above the Meeting Hall was manually by-passed before arming the zone, it will NOT be added to the armed zone when the door is closed. A reason you might manually bi-pass the meeting hall door is if someone is going to keep going in and out the door, so you do not want it to alarm.
This will be the default behavior for all Intrusion systems going forward. If you currently are using intrusion and have questions please contact support@blub0x.com and we can work with you.
Tenant Card Investigation
We have significantly improved how to debug card issues. If you get a card denied due to the card not being in the system, we have now made it very simple to get to the card number and see what is being read. When the card is not found in the Mercury controller, currently an associated event can be viewed in both the Event and Event history screens. If you select the event and then the action button you will see a list of card types with the card number and facility code for that card type. This will help people understand when the card they were given does not match the card programmed. It will help them see what a card they found in their drawer is and how it could be used. This significantly reduces the time to debug cards in BluSKY.
Event/Event History Screen
The event history screen is now paying attention to the time range selected for Alarms and Video.
Visitor/Vendor Invitation
When searching for a previously created visitor invitation you had to remember when you created the visitor request and change the search range to cover this time. We improved the search to find visitor requests that contain visitors arriving during the search range.
Ex. I created a visitor request on 1/1/2020. This visitor request has a occurrence pattern of every day. If the search range is just today, then the visitor request created on 1/1/2020 will appear. This will make is much easier to find and edit a visitor request.
Adding Access To People has Changed.
A few weeks ago, we removed the ability for a reader or floor stop to be assigned directly to people. People can only get access through Access Level and Access Level Group assignments. This is a best practice that is making is much easier for the building to know who has access and be able to change access to groups of people simply by adding or removing readers or floor stops to existing Access Levels or Access Level Groups.
Decode the Card based on the Card Bit Length
We added the ability to decode the card based on the card bit length. One of the best examples of this is in Event history, where you can look at an issue after it is reported and not need to get the person to swipe again. The screenshot below is from our test environment.
In the example below, we swiped a 26-bit card that was not assigned to anyone. You can go to Events or Event History and look up the event.
- Select the event.
- Select “Action” button
- Pick the card format that matches the number on the hot stamp or the one that matches the card format currently in the controller. Now you know the card type, number, and FC.
Bug Fixes
Address issue where a customer could not assign a new Mifare card to a Vendor visitor request during check-in.