Originally Posted by
gfunkdave
Hi all, my dad owns a professional building (and has his dental practice there). He's interested in switching his old fashioned metal keys for proxy cards. I imagine he'll need someone to come out and wire things up, but I'm wondering if anyone has experience with electronic access control systems. What's the cheapest way to proceed that doesn't have an adverse impact on security?
As soon as you go electronic locks, you're subject to new city requirements and the fire marshal will be the most critical of your installation. I'd recommend going with DoorStrikes whenever possible because egress is mechanical much like a normal door. Going Maglocks will be more expensive due to the requirements needed to ensure egress in a failure.
There are many standards out there, ProxCard, MiFare, iClass that are all what most people think of as prox cards. For your install, they'll probably recommend ProxCard II which is basic and will be sufficient.
I've used a few systems in my past and whichever you go with should be controlled by a PLC natively on site and then programmed either by computer onsite or cloud service. Do not get a system that requires a PC to be on 24/7 in order to function. This will inevitably fail and cause issues.
If you want to outsource the whole thing--Stanley Security (formally Sonitrol) can do it all for you pretty much anywhere nationwide. They can remotely configure it and do adds/moves/ and changes for you. Their alarm monitoring is done via microphones and they've been very reliable in my past dealings. They cover Access Control/ Video / and Alarm monitoring. They're not cheap by any means, but they have their own platform that they support so if anything comes up, they have techs that can deal with it internally.