Established in 1845, the Royal Agricultural College was the first agricultural college to be established in the English speaking world. As a leading university college it offers over 40 career-focussed programmes within its School of Agriculture, School of Business and School of Real Estate and Land Management covering agriculture, equine management, business and rural land and property management and is home to a vibrant community of over 1000 students.

Salto were able to offer the college a modern solution to security in its student accommodation by retro-fitting a smart card based access solution to replace its outdated keyed system. The XS4 system met a vital client requirement for an up to date security solution that provided far greater control over who could access what, where and when and provide full audit trail accountability to resolve any access issues should these arise.

The upgrade is a pilot being carried out on a rolling project basis. So far the first two accommodation blocks have been completed with 2 online doors being fitted with Salto WRM9000 series wall readers at 'hot spots' at main entranceways to control perimeter security, and 20 offline bedroom and 4 back of house offline office doors being fitted with XS4 electronic escutcheons. The system uses Salto's patented data-on-card SVN (Salto Virtual Network) technology which is capable of controlling an unlimited number of users and doors in a single system.

Jim Caola, sales director of Gem Security Centre Ltd, said: "The existing lock installation at the college's student accommodation did not provide the amount of protection or security information now required to manage the access control movement of the students. Having security that is reliable and dependable is obviously important for a building housing so many young people. With our ability to customize both the system hardware and software, we have designed a highly secure and flexible access control platform to meet both their current and future needs.

The handle sets read, receive and write information via Mifare cards as students enter and leave the accommodation buildings and since most access related information is kept encrypted on these cards, the perimeter door mounted wall readers are able to update and receive information from the cards at any time.

This provides 90 % of the benefits of a fully online access control system at the cost of a stand alone system, and as the students use their smart ID cards, they build up an on-card audit trails enabling college management to track their movement through both the offline and online parts of the system as and when required. And if a card is lost or stolen it can be quickly deleted from the system," adds Caola.

Phil Wood, facilities manager at the Royal Agricultural College comments: "We're very impressed with the Salto product. Its advanced system design gives an impressive degree of control over our student accommodation security. And as this same accommodation is also used by Isis students and conference delegates during the summer months when our normal students are not in residence, the flexibility of our new XS4 system endorses the fact that we can safely and securely look after these visitors too."