ID Card Printer Encoding

[ajg]

Hi, we are in the process of having Paxton gate security system installed and am just about to purchase a card printer for our staff mifare ID cards. Just looking for some advice on whether we need a printer that has an encoder installed as not 100% sure we need one and have no previous experience of this kind of system. Do the encoders just mean you can program the card with an UID of your choice rather than using the ID that comes with the card? We will be using the cards with the Net2 software and shortly with Papercut on our MFD's. Papercut will probably be set up to so staff can self register their cards so having a common ID between the systems shouldn't be needed but I guess might be useful for future proofing.

 

Have I understood this correctly meaning an encoder is not strictly needed?

[MartinRouterKing]

Hi, we have Paxton locks on our doors! We also have Riso printers with ID reader on. We don't have a printer that encodes the cards we just by Mifare 1K cards and they work fine.

[MatthewL]

You don't encode mifare cards, you buy them pre encoded so ensure you get compatible ones.

 

Unless you can get a field into AD when they present their card at a PaperCut machine they will need to associate themselves with their AD details for the first time. You may find that PaperCut and Paxton read the card as 2 different numbers. Ensure that your card readers for PaperCut are compatible with the same cards you use for Paxton as there are a number of mifare types.

[psydii]

Having a card printer that can read/encode data onto a card allows you to have a card printing system that pulls data from your MIS, prints your cards and then pushes the card data into the various places it needs to be automatically.

 

On top of the cost of the printer is the cost of the integration system, this is usually several thousand pounds to get set up if you have a several systems to integrate. The key decision the Powers That Be need to make is: does the consistency and automation of an integrated system balance the cost when compared to having to load the card data into the separate systems?

 

The reason it needs The Powers That Be to look at it, is that cashless system, Access Control, Printing and the Library cross several functional areas and any solution/analysis requires co-operation between them.

[ajg]

Thanks for the input everyone, that pretty much confirms what I needed to know. As we only have to integrate the Paxton and papercut systems there is no real need or extra work involved in using the standard mifare card UID.

[PotNoodleTech]

You don't need to encode, the software will use the existing code on each card. Multiple software's can use the same code on the same card too, e.g I have gate access software and Equitrac Print software using the same cards.

[CyberDrac]

We have a door system/TDSi that uses the last 8 digits from the MiFare cards, some of our systems (Library/Oliver, Catering/Impact) read the full number, and Printing/Equitrac via AD reads the number provided it has been padded out to 10 digits with leading zeroes.