Organizing the Surveillance

• By Ralph C. Jensen
• Nov 03, 2014

The security industry is huge, and I often depend upon others to send me leads and tips about possible stories. This is the case with education and security, as the two go hand-in-hand.

In this issue’s cover story, I was alerted to a recent install at the Garfield Public Schools in New Jersey. Mary Wilbur, the vice president of marketing at Salient Systems, brought to my attention an overhaul at all 14 schools and two administrative sites.

What makes this story interesting is the fact that the schools worked with Jim Kane, a consultant working exclusively with the National Cooperative Purchasing Agreement. This agreement means a job is spec’ed out, and already meets established criteria for purchase and install of new equipment. The best part, Garfield schools will not only save money, but they get best-of-breed equipment, too.

Garfield Public Schools has been searching for a more responsive video with reduced bandwidth consumption. When all is said and done, the schools will have installed more than 400 Sony IP networked cameras and will be using Salient Systems VMS. More intriguing is the VMS’ Dynamic Resolution Scaling (DRS) option. According to Brian Carle, Salient’s director of product strategy, DRS will scale the video to the server and to the screen that an authorized person will be viewing. It will send only the resolution that is necessary, keeping bandwidth usage to a minimum.

I hope you enjoy our Campus Security and Life Safety specialty publication. There are a number of takeaways from this issue, including helpful case studies about campus emergency notification stands (Sam Shanes, Talkaphone) and card-based identification (Brett St. Pierre, HID Global). Our other authors have poured knowledge and experience into their submissions, which I’m sure you will enjoy, as well.

We’re all in this together, making the campus a safer and more secure environment.

This article originally appeared in the November 2014 issue of Security Today.