Access Manager: Access Control Management Inside Axxon One and Axxon PSIM

From integration to management

AxxonSoft's access control work started where most video platforms start: with integration. ACFA, the AxxonSoft integration package for access control and security equipment, connects controllers, readers and terminals from many manufacturers to Axxon One and Axxon PSIM. In its original role, ACFA did what an integration layer does. It brought access events and device states into the platform and let operators act on them. Inside Axxon One, an access control system can run in one of two modes:

• Monitoring and management mode. Operators view access information, control access points with commands and macros and see the status of access points. Cardholders and access rights are managed somewhere else.
• Extended employee management mode. Everything above, plus management of identifiers, cardholder properties and cardholder data. Access levels, time zones, areas and departments are configured here too.

Access Manager is the second mode in practice. It turns ACFA from a set of device connections into an operational layer for access control management. Cardholder enrollment, access policy, visitor handling, occupancy and reporting all happen in the same environment as the video and the events they relate to.

For consultants writing specifications and integrators planning deployments, that changes the conversation. The question is no longer only "which access control brands does the VMS support?" It becomes "where does the site's access control administration live, and who works in it?"

Why access control management belongs in the security platform

There are practical reasons to put access control administration next to video and event monitoring rather than beside it.

One operator environment. When the badging office and the control room use separate systems, routine questions turn into hand-offs. Is this contractor's card still valid? Which department is this person in? Who else is on the third floor right now? If the operator handling an alarm can see the cardholder record, access level and area occupancy in the same platform, the answer doesn't depend on reaching another team.

One record of events. An access event is more useful when it sits on the same timeline as the video from that door and the other alarms on site. Investigations, audits and incident reviews go faster when nobody has to line up timestamps from two systems.

Consistent identity. The photo the badging office captures at enrollment is the same photo the control room operator sees on a photo identification event. The department a person belongs to is the department that appears in reports and on occupancy counters. When identity data lives in one place, it is easier to keep accurate.

Fewer systems to maintain. Each separate application on a site means another set of user accounts, another upgrade cycle and another place where data can drift. For an end user, consolidating access control administration into the security platform reduces that overhead. For an integrator, it means one fewer application to commission, document and support.

None of this replaces the access control hardware or the controller's own logic. Access decisions still happen at the door. What Access Manager changes is where the people, rules and records behind those decisions are managed.

Cardholders, departments and credentials

Most access control administration revolves around a few objects: people, the organization they belong to and the credentials they carry. Access Manager is built around those objects, and it uses the organization structure to carry access policy so that operators aren't setting rights one person at a time.

The department tree carries the access policy

Cardholders are organized in a department hierarchy. Departments can have child departments, can be moved within the tree together with their children and can be searched by name or by assigned access level.

Each department carries access levels, and every cardholder in it inherits them. A new department starts with the system level Never, so nobody gains access by default until someone deliberately assigns rights. There is also a system level Always for unrestricted access.

At the individual level, an operator can:

• Inherit the department's access levels (the default).
• Assign one or more personal access levels.
• Switch inheritance of the department's levels off for that person, and back on.
• Set the person to Always or Never, which removes all other levels.

For a site with hundreds or thousands of cardholders, this inheritance model is what keeps access policy manageable. Rights are designed once per department, and exceptions are visible as exceptions.

The cardholder record

A cardholder record holds what a badging office needs to identify a person and manage their access:

• Full name, photo, email address, phone number and address
• Personnel number and an identification document
• An external ID, used when the cardholder database is shared with external software through the integration module
• Free-text additional information and configurable additional fields
• A blocking flag, an antibadgeback setting, and card start and expiration dates
• The person's department and access levels

The module's general settings can hide fields or make them read-only, so the record can be fitted to the site's data policy. Photos can be uploaded from a file, captured from a connected camera and cropped in the editing window.

Operators can find people by quick search on surname or by a general search across the database. A cardholder who changes roles can be moved to a different department without re-creating the record.

Credentials

Each cardholder can hold cards and PIN codes. Supported card formats include Wiegand 26, Wiegand 32, Mifare with 4, 7 or 8-byte UIDs and TouchMemory. Card codes can be entered as facility code and card number or as a full code in decimal or hexadecimal, which helps when card data comes from a supplier list or another system.

Each card carries its own settings for blocking, start date, expiration date and antibadgeback. By default these inherit from the cardholder, but any of them can be overridden per card. When a card or PIN code is saved, Access Manager validates its dates, so date errors are caught at the desk, not discovered later at a door.

Work that scales: bulk changes and enrollment at the desk

A large share of badging office time goes on repetitive edits. A new team starts on Monday. A department moves to a different floor. A project ends and the same change has to be made to a whole group of records. Access Manager supports bulk creation, editing and deletion of cardholder parameters from context menus. During a bulk edit, the module shows how many people are being edited, so the operator can see the scope of the change.

Card enrollment is built around the reader rather than the keyboard. To assign a card, the operator presents it to a reader and uses Receive from reader. Access Manager takes the card number from the read event and attaches it to the cardholder. Nobody has to key in a long card number by hand, so there is no typo to make.

Badge design and printing

Badgees are designed in Access Manager's built-in template editor. A template can combine static text and images, lines, barcodes, the cardholder's photo, a camera image area and fields pulled from the Access Manager database, such as full name, department, job title or ID. Templates can be previewed with a real cardholder's data before they go into use.

Once a template is saved, the operator can print a badge for a cardholder on a connected printer or save it as a PDF. Different templates can serve different cardholder types, for example staff, contractors and visitors.

Visitor access control, step by step

Visitors are where many sites still rely on paper sign-in books, shared temporary cards or separate visitor management software. Access Manager handles visitors with the same mechanisms it uses for employees: a cardholder record, a credential, an access level and a validity window. That keeps visitor access control inside the same policy, monitoring and reporting as everyone else on site.

The process below follows one visit from start to finish. At each stage it covers what the badging office decides and what Access Manager does.

Visitor registration before arrival

Visitor registration starts with a cardholder record created in advance. The badging office needs to make a few decisions at this point:Where the visitor sits in the tree. Two practical options are a dedicated visitor department or a child department under the host's department. Because access levels inherit from the department, this choice sets the visitor's default rights.

Which credential they will carry. A card from the badging office stock, a PIN code or a printed badge with a barcode generated from a template.

The validity window. A start date and an end date on the credential. For a one-day visit, both fall on the same day.

Any different access. If a visitor needs rights that differ from the department's defaults, the operator assigns personal access levels to that record only.

Pre-registering visitors moves data entry away from the front desk and away from the moment someone is standing in the lobby.

In Axxon PSIM, Access Manager can also email a badge template with the visitor's QR code before the visit, so the badge reaches the visitor before they reach reception.

Visitor check-in at the desk

At visitor check-in, the work is to confirm the person, complete the record and hand over a credential. With Access Manager:

• The operator captures a photo from the camera at the desk directly into the cardholder record.
• A card from stock is assigned by presenting it to a reader, with no manual entry of card numbers.
• If the site uses printed badges, the badge is printed from the template with the visitor's photo, name, host department and barcode.

Because the record was created before arrival, check-in comes down to these few steps. The photo taken here becomes the reference image that control room operators see if that visitor's credential generates a photo identification event later in the day.

On site: access rules, occupancy and video

Once the visitor is through reception, visitor access control relies on the same rules as everyone else.

• Access level. The level defines which access points the credential opens and on which schedule. A visitor level might cover reception, meeting rooms and the route between them, during business hours.
• Antibadgeback. With antibadgeback enabled, the same card can't be used by a second person in the same direction. The setting can apply per cardholder or per card.
• Areas and occupancy. Areas are zones of the site linked to access points, with entry and exit readers assigned to each area. Operators can see a live list and count of the people currently in each area, which includes visitors.
• Video at the door. On an access attempt, Axxon One can display live video from the camera aimed at the access point next to the cardholder's credentials and photo from the database. Live video can also be raised on alarm monitors automatically for forced-entry events at the doors visitors use.

Departure, overstays and lost cards

The validity end date closes access without anyone having to remember to revoke it. A visitor credential with an end date simply stops working when that date expires.

One practical detail for system designers: if a controller doesn't support time-of-day for card validity, the card expires at 00:00 on the day after the expiration date. For visits that must end at a specific hour, choose hardware that records time with the date, or plan for a manual block at departure.

A card that isn't returned or is reported lost can be blocked immediately from the cardholder record, either for that card alone or for the whole cardholder.

Visitor logs after the visit

Every badgeage a visitor makes is recorded as an access event. The Passages report turns those events into a visitor log: a table of each badgeage with the person, department, entry area, exit area, date and time for the selected period.

Visitor logs are useful only if they can be filtered to answer the question asked. The report can cover the whole site, one or more departments or specific people selected across departments, and it exports to PDF or Excel for audit files. Because Axxon One synchronizes recordings from cameras associated with access points to the access events, an operator reviewing a visitor's movements can retrieve the footage of any badgeage.

Contractors and shared sites

Contractors fit the same model with longer validity windows. A contractor department with its own access levels and schedules keeps maintenance crews to plant rooms and service corridors during agreed hours. When the contract ends, the end date on their credentials closes access.

On multi-tenant sites, such as business centers or shared industrial facilities, each company can be set up as a department. Each tenant's staff and visitors then inherit that company's access levels, and reports can be generated per company. This gives a building manager a per-tenant visitor log without a separate system for each tenant.

For a feature-level view of how Axxon One supports these workflows, see the Axxon One visitor management system page.

Access levels, schedules and areas

Behind every credential sits an access policy, and Access Manager builds that policy from three components.

Schedules define when. A schedule is made of weekly intervals: a start time, an end time and the days of the week on which the interval applies. A schedule can hold several intervals, so a split shift or a weekend pattern is a single schedule. Schedules also serve as work schedules for the people assigned to them. A non-editable Always schedule covers round-the-clock access.

Access levels define where and when together. An access level links access points, such as readers and doors, to a schedule for each point. A "Warehouse day shift" level might open the loading dock and warehouse doors from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. on weekdays. Access levels are assigned to departments and inherited by cardholders, or assigned to individuals as described above. In Access Manager's terms, an access level also determines the rules for arming and disarming an access point.

Access level design has a practical effect on controller memory. When cardholder configuration is written to a controller or terminal, only the cardholders whose access levels include at least one access point on that device are written to it. A person with access only to terminal 1 isn't stored on terminal 2. On large sites with many controllers, well-scoped access levels keep each device's cardholder list to the people who need it.

Areas define the physical zones of the site. Areas are linked to access points and can be nested as child areas, searched and reorganized. For each area, the Areas tab shows badgeages in real time, the list of people currently inside and how many there are. Readers can also be placed on a map for visual control. The area structure is what makes occupancy counts, presence reports and antibadgeback meaningful, so it is worth designing alongside the access levels, not after them.

Reporting: badgeage history, presence and investigations

Access control data earns its value when someone asks a question about the past. Access Manager provides three report types, each built around a period and a selection of people.

Every report can be run for the whole organization (Passages and Areas), for a department, for several departments or for selected people chosen from different departments. That last option matters more than it sounds. Real questions rarely follow the org chart. An audit of a project floor may involve people from engineering, finance and two contractor firms. An incident review may concern five specific people and a handful of visitors. Reports that cut across departments answer those questions in one run.

The Presence report groups multiple entries per person and shows the total time for each group. A Simple report option calculates presence from the first entry and last exit of the day and ignores the movements in between. Access Manager can also calculate total hours worked per person and present them per department.

Reports can be exported to PDF or Excel, so they go straight into audit files, client reports or a spreadsheet for further analysis.

A note for consultants scoping a project: these presence and attendance calculations support access and attendance reporting, but Access Manager in Axxon One is not a full time-and-attendance system. Advanced shift scheduling, lateness tracking and workforce-discipline reports are not included. Where a customer needs those, plan for an HR or T&A system alongside it. Axxon PSIM, on the contrary, has its own Time and Attendance Module included in the Access Manager.

For visitor logs specifically, the Passages report is the main tool. Filtered by a visitor department, it shows every visitor badgeage in the period. Filtered by a tenant department on a shared site, it gives that tenant's visitor history. In Axxon One, recordings from the cameras associated with access points are synchronized to the same access events, so the footage of any badgeage can be retrieved.

Connecting access control to event monitoring and security operations

The point of running access control management inside the security platform is that access events stop being a separate stream. They become part of the same operational picture as video, alarms and the other systems on site.

The Event Manager workspace

Access Manager's Event Manager gives operators a configurable workspace for access events and device states. Operators build their own layouts from four widget types:

• Photoident shows photo identification events, with the cardholder's photo and department from the database next to the event. Operators can require that events are handled before they clear, auto-select the latest event and remove handled events automatically.
• Events shows system events in a table, filtered by object groups and types and by severity: normal, warnings, failures and alarms. It can be limited to badgeage events only.
• States shows the current state of selected objects, such as access points and controllers, with the same severity filtering.
• Presence shows the number of people in a selected area, as a total and in separate rows for chosen departments. Each row can have its own label and visual emphasis, and counts can include child departments.

A reception desk, a control room and a facilities office can each have a layout suited to its job. Reception might pair a Photoident widget with a Presence widget for the visitor area. The control room might focus on alarms and device states across the site.

Video at every access point

On the video side, Axxon One links access events to the cameras associated with each access point. On an access attempt, the operator sees live video from the camera aimed at that door next to the credential details and the photo on file, and can launch the reactions configured for that event. For forced-entry events, live video can be pushed automatically to alarm monitors.

After the fact, recordings from those cameras are synchronized to the access events, so operators can retrieve the footage of any badgeage.

Access control in a wider security operation

Axxon PSIM takes this further. It is a distributed physical security information management platform that brings together various security systems, from access control to fire sensors and intrusion detection, with event-driven automation. With Access Manager running inside Axxon PSIM, access control administration and monitoring become one part of a site-wide security operation, and access events sit alongside alarms from other subsystems in the same event-driven environment.

Built for day-to-day operation and larger sites

A tool that badging offices and control rooms keep open all shift has to hold up over long sessions, unstable networks and growing sites. Access Manager is engineered with that daily use in mind:

Long uptime. The server side of Access Manager runs stably over extended uptime.

Connection loss. Event Manager layouts and Template Editor interfaces stay stable if the connection to the server drops.

Distributed systems. The client window title shows the server version and the node name. Operators working with several clients connected to different servers can see at a glance which one they are in.

Operator comfort. Font and icon sizes can be scaled manually to suit the screen and the operator, and the interface is localized, including English, French and Spanish.

Larger installations. In Axxon PSIM, Access Manager runs stably on systems with a huge number of readers dispersed across different sites.

Access Manager device support varies and should be confirmed for the specific controller during design. The access control integration page lists supported systems.

Axxon One or Axxon PSIM

Access Manager is available on both AxxonSoft platforms. The right choice depends on the rest of the project, not on access control alone.

Axxon One is AxxonSoft's video management software, scalable from small installations to multi-location deployments. It fits projects where video surveillance is the core of the system and access control should be administered in the same place. The workflows described in this article, from bulk cardholder edits and reader-based enrollment to synchronized video for every badgeage, reflect Access Manager in Axxon One.

Axxon PSIM is AxxonSoft's physical security information management platform. It fits projects that unify several security subsystems, such as access control, fire sensors and intrusion detection, in a single environment with event-driven automation. In Axxon PSIM, Access Manager can email a QR code badge ahead of a visit and runs stably on geographically distributed installations with many readers. For PSIM projects, confirm specific Access Manager functions with AxxonSoft during design.

FAQ