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University of Johannesburg connected by Impro

The University of Johannesburg was founded a few years ago when the South African government decided to combine three previously independent universities and technikons into one.

The result was the integration of three separate infrastructures and five campuses into the new entity.

The University of Johannesburg is now the largest university in South Africa with campuses in Auckland Park, Cottesloe, Daveyton, Doornfontein and Soweto. In total, all five campuses currently accommodate a total of up to 100 000 students and staff, all of whom need to be logged into the campus and various areas within the university at various times.

"To accommodate so many transactions from all these people efficiently, the university could not retain isolated databases of people at the separate campuses, especially since many people with access to one campus now have a right to access facilities on other campuses," explains Wimpie Genis, Impro system coordinator at the university.

"A system was therefore required that would firstly consolidate the flow of student and staff data into a single database and secondly, allow local configuration of student details on each of the five sites. This would entail implementing an infrastructure that would allow changes to be made to data on any site and then automatically uploaded and stored in the central database - without requiring any further interaction from administrators."

As Impro Technologies had already installed ImproNet software at two of the five campuses, and it is a robust and scalable application that could handle the registration of an almost infinite number of people and their daily transactions, the university decided to standardise on the product.

Impro Technologies was therefore awarded a contract to install its IXP 400 ImproNet system. All five sites were connected via a wide-area network (WAN) to a single ImproNet database running on SQL Server, hosted at the University of Johannesburg Auckland Park campus.

Genis says the decision was made to go with SQL Server as it would permit the database to grow to a large but manageable size and it was a robust system that would easily handle the up to 65 000 daily transactions from all the campuses.

Alastair Mcphail, business development manager for Impro Technologies, explains that Impro installed ImproNet Engine software on a separate PC on each campus. The software polls all the on-campus hardware, such as terminals and readers, allowing local administrators to configure the access control on each campus. Each campus connects to the central server via the university's WAN and data is synchronised between the server and the engines on a regular basis.

Genis adds that the university makes use of ImproNet's graphical runtime module to make it easier to control access and security issues. Although video surveillance is not implemented yet due to bandwidth constraints, the system will be able to provide images of areas in which an alarm was raised. For example, should a fire alarm sound, the system could bring up an image of the location to assist staff in ensuring the safety of people in the area and in implementing the most effective countermeasures.

Impro has now installed 29 controllers and five local PC engines on the campuses, all of which are connected to the central SQL Server database via the university's WAN. Genis says Impro has proved itself a solid, reliable system and he has no complaints. He adds that the software as well as the implementation service provided was good.

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