How the University of District of Columbia is Using their Honeywell Security System

Allen Sessoms: UDC is the only public university in the District of Columbia. Right now, we have about 6000 students growing at about 20-30% a year, two components, a community college, and the UDC, a flagship university with about 3500 students.

Jonathan Guerverra: Our goal is to make sure that we can provide training for all residents, education for all residents of the District, so that we can make the District a much more viable city, particularly for those individuals who have been traditionally under-represented in higher education.

Mark Farley: The university's administration has embarked on program review, on tremendous facilities improvement, and improvement in virtually every aspect of our operation.

Jonathan Guerverra: With 65% of our students being female, safety becomes a very, very critical thing, particularly since many of them are not going to be commuting in cars. They'll be coming to the campus using Metro, and other kinds of public transportation.

Mark Farley: The broader sense of safety is to apply all the best practices in risk management and risk mitigation, to automate, to maximize your safety force, to prevent the kind of problems that can hurt folks, and have folks feeling insecure about their environments.

Ronald Culmer: One of the major security concerns at the University of DC is the fact that we are very open which, by nature, most universities are in an open culture, so day-to-day we have many visitors to the campus. We have dignitaries. We're also surrounded by embassies, so at any moment anything could change. We have a unique situation where our officers are challenged with providing safety and security, for anywhere between 6500 and 10,000 people a day.

Safety Officer: We're tasked with covering several areas. We have actually four locations that we need to cover. We handle our security needs, our policing needs by a combination of technology, and human beings, and human resources. We're striking that balance right now, as we try to involve more and more technology.

Allen Sessoms: We want to be able to ensure that people walking around this campus, actually belong on this campus. As I say, the urban environment is kind of a challenge. We want to secure the buildings. We want to make sure that when people come in they're comfortable. Advantech was at the leading edge of helping us do that at other institutions. I think one of the things they do with their security systems suggests that they really have a handle on the whole business of security; institutional and personal security; and that's what we're all about.

MAXPRO REP: I think MAXPRO was a real good solution for the university. They had approximately 50 analog cameras, coming back to digital recorders, in various buildings on campus. They had a desire to increase the video capability, and monitoring capability throughout this campus, and other campuses, but they wanted to be able to manage it through one graphical user interface.

Ronald Culmer: The deciding factor for us to upgrade to the new systems was the simple fact that all of our systems were separate. Nothing communicated, nothing worked seamless. If I needed to bring cameras over on one monitor, I had to go to a different DVR. Now with the new MAXPRO product we're able to move our cameras how we need them, based on the situation.

MAXPRO REP: The added benefit is it integrates directly with Pro-Watch, and we took an existing small Pro-Watch installation, and have expanded it to a pretty good-sized installation, and it keeps growing day by day, week by week as they add additional control, to additional doors throughout campus.

Ronald Culmer: Pro-Watch is huge for us right now. Primarily, the university operates the system to just open and close doors. This really allows us an opportunity to control who moves where. When they move, it also allows us after-hours; to close the university down to cardholder only, as opposed to just making us be open, to anyone that really doesn't need to be here after business hours.

MAXPRO REP: The value of innovation is when unique needs surface, which are not predictable, to have a technology partner that can come in, look at those needs, look at the objectives and the requirements of the end user, and take either than existing product, and customize it to solve those needs, or to write custom applications to solve those needs. In that respect, Honeywell is a great innovator.

Safety Officer: We have to be able to expand the system, to be able to do what we want it to do. So many places I've been, only size it for what they have, and don't plan on the future, so we're already planning on the future, being able to expand it.

Ronald Culmer: The previous administration really was forward-thinking in their ability for us to expand, so now we're getting to reap those benefits, and I feel that going forth with Honeywell we should be able to continue to do that, no question.

Allen Sessoms: Universities that aren't safe are not going to function particularly well. If faculty, students, and staff are afraid to go to a location, the place is not going to thrive or survive, so we need to be as secure as conceivably possible in an urban environment. We need to be an oasis, for the people of this town and this region and we're looking forward to becoming that.