Creating Watch Lists in EasyLobby SVM is an excellent way to notify you of unwanted visitors, or correspondingly, of VIPs that you may want to provide special treatment upon entry to your facilities.

Watch Lists can be either internal lists - names of individuals that you put into the system. When that individual checks in at an EasyLobby station, a window pops up and notifies the lobby attendant. You can set special instructions for each person, such as "call security" in the case of a malicious person, or "escort immediately to the executive office" for a VIP.

Watch Lists can also be external lists that you can subscribe to with your EasyLobby system such as the National Sex Offender Database or the Government Denied Database, which includes a range of government denied persons. See our blog "Screen Visitors Against Government Denied Databases" for a partial list of these.

To use an internal watch list in your SVM station, go to Alerts in the Edit menu and click on the Watch List tab. If you need further assistance, contact our technical support team. You can also have emails sent to various individuals in your organization when a visitor on your watch list checks in.

To subscribe to external watch lists, contact our sales organization for more information.

A 30-story office high-rise in Newark, N.J., One Gateway Center has installed EasyLobby visitor management in its lobby with great success.

The installation, which included an integration with access control systems and turnstiles, was installed by EasyLobby partner Engineered Security Systems of Towaco, N.J. It eliminated the need for the roving guards in the lobby and additional roving guards in the attached parking garage. The entire installation paid for itself in less than a year.

Previously, visitors had to sign a ledge at the check-in desk. Now a guard at the check-in desk scans the visitor's driver's license, passport, or business card, which automatically populates a database and prints out a temporary bar-coded badge that interfaces with readers controlled by an access control system from AMAG Technology.

Like the guard at the front desk, a security guard in the parking garage can also scan visitors' credentials using a wireless handled device that has a built in scanner, and then print out a bar code visitor badge.

The new system offers a higher level of assurance that visitors will not re-enter the premises at a future date without checking in again because visitor badges are programmed to automatically expire after a certain number of hours.

"The client is absolutely thrilled with the system," said David George, president of Engineered Security Systems.

The next phase of the installation will include the addition of eAdvance™ software to allow employees to pre-register guests, saving additional guard time by eliminating the need for the guard to call the person the visitor is coming to see.

Read the complete article about the EasyLobby installation at One Gateway Center.

Building Magazine recently selected the industry's top money-saving products for building facilities, and EasyLobby visitor management was ranked as one of them.

The magazine, in its June 2010 issue stated, "Astute selection of building products can save money in a number of ways : initial costs, life-cycle cost, sustainability, longevity, energy efficiency, occupant productivity, and maintenance requirements."

The Buildings editorial staff considered all of these criteria to cull a group of 81 high-performance products.

The magazine highlighted EasyLobby's eAdvance™, which can streamline the process of visitor sign in and issuing visitor badges.

Using eAdvance™, employees log onto a web interface and fill out a simple visitor information form. No training is necessary. When the pre-registered guest arrives, one mouse click by the guard or receptionist checks the visitor in and a customized, professional-looking badge is printed.

For more information about eAdvance™ employee pre-registration, contact us.

One of the features of EasyLobby is to print a visitor badge for every visitor that comes into the lobby.  Each visitor needs a badge with a consistent format. However, each visitor name is also unique.  EasyLobby puts each unique visitor's data into a contained, consistent format.  One example, outlined below, is how the visitor's name shows up on the badge.

 

A customer recently contacted EasyLobby tech support asking if we can make the visitor's name show up uniquely for each visitor.  The answer is yes.  More specifically, the name field on the visitor badge can be made to expand and shrink in size, based on how long the visitor's name is.  Put another way, EasyLobby can make the font size on the visitor badge change dynamically.

 

You can make the font size for names dynamically change in EasyLobby SVM, depending on the length of the person's name:

First, go into EasyLobby Designer by choosing ( Edit | Badge Options... ) from the top menu and clicking on the "customize" button.

  

Then in the EasyLobby Designer, put the ShownName variable onto the grid by dragging and dropping it from the List Of Variables popup box (you can make this popup box appear by selecting ( View | Windows | Popup Variables ) from the top menu of EasyLobby Designer)

Next, to change the font size of the object, double-click on it on the grid and in the Text Properties window that opens up is where you can set the font size.

Finally, to set the Appearance Condition of the object, right-click on the object and choose "Appearance Condition..."  In the "Edit Condition..." window that opens up is where you can enter the formula for the appearance condition (this will become more clear below, see the formulas below that look like this: "Len (ShownName)...")

 

Use this process to make a total of four text objects containing the ShownName variable(that represents the visitor's name), and set their font sizes and appearance conditions such that the longer names have smaller font sizes and such that only one shows up at any given time.

Here are the specific conditions and font sizes for each of the 4 ShownName text objects:

 

Font size 10 for people with more than 30 letters in their name.

Appearance condition:

Len (ShownName) >= 31

 

Font size 14 for people with between 21 and 30 letters in their name:

Appearance condition:

Len (ShownName) <= 30 and Len(ShownName) >= 21

 

font size 18 for people with between 11 and 20 letters in their name:

Appearance condition:

Len (ShownName) <= 20 and Len(ShownName) >= 11

 

Font size 22 for people with ten or fewer letters in their name:

Appearance condition:

Len (ShownName) <= 10

 

 

The end result is that depending on the length of the person's name, the font size will change on the badge.  For example, if a person named Lisa Lee came to the lobby, the font for her name would show up in the larger font size of 22, as in this picture:

And for example if a person named Christopher Hernandez came to the lobby, the font for his name would show up in the smaller font size of 14, as in this picture:

 

 

In either case, the space gets filled by the visitor's name.

For more assistance formatting visitor badges, contact our technical support team.