ID Card management

[JoeWallace]

Hi all,

 

My question is to do with student cards, we have the name, image, barcode as text with login number, coloured bar with colour of year group, the barcode and coloured bar swapping sides depending which half of the year group they're in.

 

Currently we do it all through Photoshop with a template, but as you can imagine it can get pretty time consuming when we're getting in excess of 15+ ID card requests a day amongst other jobs.

 

What system/s do you use and how do you find it in day to day use?

 

We need something that could ideally do everything automated with just one piece of information like a name or SIMs admission number.

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Joe

[Steve21]

We did use SIMs for printing ours (Effectively a word mailmerge template), but recently had new catering system so it changed but the old way still works if we need one offs etc.

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/av-multimedia-related/155709-id-card-printing.html#post1334975

 

Steve

[Arthur]

Currently we do it all through Photoshop with a template, but as you can imagine it can get pretty time consuming when we're getting in excess of 15+ ID card requests a day amongst other jobs.

We currently use InDesign for our student ID badges. With the data merging feature, a CSV file generated from SIMS and Salamander's free Photo Export tool, the process is very quick.

 

A basic CSV file would look like this...

 

Legal Surname,Forename,Adno,@Photos
Brown,Charlie,001234,\Images\001234.jpg

 

The image path in the '@Photos' column is relative to the InDesign template.

 

InDesign should also be able to automatically generate barcodes based on data from the CSV file too.

[iLife]

We use this: Magicard ID Card Printers - Essentra Security UK

 

It seems to work well for our staff, although personally i've never used it.

[p3t3r]

We've made a PHP/MySQL script that generates a PDF. This links in with our internally developed student information system. The script can generate cards for an entire class or an individual student.