STOPware Blog: Stay Up to Date on Everything You Need to Know About Visitor Management

The PASS (Partner Alliance for Safer Schools) school safety and security guidelines establish the best practices for securing K-12 school facilities. Established in 2014, due to the increasing rate of violent school incidents, the PASS school security checklist allows you to track your school or district’s security exercises in comparison to the best practices identified in the Guidelines.

It has become more and more vital for organizations to invest in some form of Visitor Management System to keep their premises secure. With so many feature-rich products on the market, how do you decipher which features are necessary for your organization? Customization has become one of the leading and most talked about features amongst the different Visitor Management Systems. Visitor Management is not a one-size-fits-all solution and in order to utilize the software to its greatest potential, you need to be able to manipulate the software to support to the needs of your organization.

So you’ve made the decision to add an electronic visitor management system to your security program. Now what to do to ensure you take advantage of the features available to secure your facility. What’s next? When visitors want to enter your premises - what are the guidelines? It is essential to consider the multiple screening and watch list services integrated with your VMS. Screening against watchlists can be a helpful tool used to compliment your organizations security platform. Incorporating one, if not all of these lists, will make your first line of defense more secure.

GDPR stands for the General Data Protection Regulation. It replaces the Data Protection Directive created in 1995 when the internet as we know it today was just getting started. GDPR gives stronger rights of the “Data Subject” (person) for control over their data and consolidates the regulations within the European Union (EU).

Choosing the right Visitor Management System (VMS) for your organization and specific workflow can be difficult and time consuming. Not all Visitor Management Systems are created equal and it is essential to designate time to figure out which type of systems will benefit your targeted needs. One of the very first questions you should ask yourself is what type of VMS should I choose - Client-Server or a Cloud / Web-Based System?

Recently I accompanied a friend when she was picking her daughter up from school. Working with visitor management since 2002, I was very excited to see what the school was doing for visitor management. I knew that with a little investment, the school could know who was coming, who was allowed to pick up students, and screen against unwanted visitors, including known sex offenders.

On August 25th, Harvey made landfall in Texas. Harvey devastated the area from Houston into Louisiana. In a four-day period, many areas received more than 40 inches (100 cm) of rain as the system stalled over eastern Texas, causing catastrophic flooding. The resulting floods inundated hundreds of thousands of homes, displaced more than 30,000 people, and prompted more than 17,000 rescues.

We are back from ASIS 2017 in Dallas, Texas and almost recovered! We wanted to share our week and what better way to do it - with pictures. What's that old saying? A picture is worth a thousand words? Well, here you go.

We are off to ASIS in Dallas. This will be our 20th year attending ASIS! We remain one of the few visitor management companies to display at ASIS.

At STOPware, we are continually investing in product development to ensure that PassagePoint is the most robust and feature-rich Visitor Management System available. In our new release of PassagePoint Global (Build 6365) we've implemented many new features including: performance improvements, new Access Control integrations, and many other features for web pre-registration, kiosk and badge design. Check out what's new and plan your upgrade today.

In our new release of PassagePoint Global (Build 6356) we implemented 8 new features as well as a multitude of improvements. All these developments will not only allow you to more easily process visitors in a timely fashion, but there are also some new features to assist backend data processing.

Visitor management refers to tracking the usage of a public building or site by visitors/non-employees. By gathering increasing amounts of information, a Visitor Management System (VMS) can record the usage of your facility by specific visitors and provide documentation of visitor's whereabouts.

HL-7 is a healthcare standard for patient information in a hospital. This system is referred to as an ADT (Admission/Discharge/Transfer) system. All patient information is kept in this database, including real-time patient location - building, floor, room # and bed # within the hospital.