CR80News Fall 2014

CR80News ID TECHNOLOGIES IN EDUCATION FALL 2014 - ISSUE 17

E T A T S ’ ‘SELFhoItoEsubmission improvoeffsices card d n Online p a s t n e d or stu f w o l f k r o w

d r a C .

A y Gar 9 8 7 6 5 4 123 t S e t a u d a r g r e d n U

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CONTENTS

30

INDEX OF ADVERTISERS 31

Blackboard transact.blackboard.com/studentexperience

47 The CBORD Group www.cbord.com

ColorID

11

www.ColorID.com

Datacard Group

7

www.datacard.com/cr80

34

Evolis

3

28

www.evolis.com

25 Heartland Campus Solutions heartlandecsi.com/campus-cards.html

48 HID Global www.hidglobal.com/welcomed-cr80

27 IDenticard www.identicard.com

CONTENTS 6

Editorial: Deal or no deal?

When acquisitions just makes sense

34

Should a tiger change its stripe?

The role of mag stripes on the modern college campus

8

ID Shorts News and posts from the web

37

Blackboard acquires CardSmith

38

Heartland Payment Systems acquires TouchNet for $375 million Purchase increases university presence, curbs regulatory worries

40

Campus cards cloned on national TV Prox limitations highlighted, wrongfully lumps in contactless

24 Off-campus merchant programs Exploring self-op,vendor-managed options

44

Attendance evolved Baltimore public schools taking roll with contactless IDs

28

Order up! Tapingo brings mobile food ordering to campus

46

Forecasting a place for Bluetooth on campus

30

Universities turn to print cost recovery to save money, cut waste

43 NACAS www.caspcert.org

14

Say ‘Cheese’ Online photo submission eases card office burden

22

Debate continues as feds consider campus banking crackdown Politicking ensues as rulemaking process falls short

39 NACCU www.naccu.org/2015

35 SALTO Systems www. saltosystems.com

Santander Universities

2

www.santanderbank.com/smartcard

SARGENT

5

info.intelligentopenings.com/campus

ScholarChip

9

www.scholarchip.com

21

Wells Fargo www.wellsfargo.com

17

Zebra www.zebra.com/zxpseries7

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ABOUT

PERSPECTIVE

CR80News

Deal or no deal?

EXECUTIVE EDITOR & PUBLISHER Chris Corum, chris@AVISIAN.com EDITOR Zack Martin, zack@AVISIAN.com ASSOCIATE EDITOR Andrew Hudson, andrew@AVISIAN.com CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Liset Cruz, Gina Jordan ART DIRECTOR Ryan Kline ADVERTISING SALES Chris Corum, chris@AVISIAN.com Sales Department, advertise@AVISIAN.com

SUBSCRIPTIONS CR80News is free to qualified professionals in the U.S. For those who do not qualify for a free subscription, the annual rate is US$29 ($59 outside the U.S.). Visit http://store.avisian.com for subscription information. No subscription agency is authorized to solicit or take orders for subscriptions. Postmaster: Send address changes to AVISIAN Inc., 315 E. Georgia Street, Tallahassee, Florida 32301.

ABOUT CR80News CR80News is published twice a year by AVISIAN Inc., 315 E. Georgia Street, Tallahassee, Florida 32301. Chris Corum, President and CEO. Circulation records are maintained at AVISIAN Inc., 315 E. Georgia Street, Tallahassee, Florida 32301.

Copyright 2014 by AVISIAN Inc. All material contained herein is protected by copyright laws and owned by AVISIAN Inc. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. The inclusion or exclusion of any does not mean that the publisher advocates or rejects its use. While considerable care is taken in the production of this and all issues, no responsibility can be accepted for any errors or omissions, unsolicited manuscripts, photographs, artwork, etc.

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When acquisitions just make sense ANDREW HUDSON, ASSOCIATE EDITOR, AVISIAN PUBLICATIONS

The campus card industry has once again seen some of its major players jockeying for position, with Blackboard acquiring fellow campus card vendor CardSmith, and Heartland Payment Systems purchasing payments specialist TouchNet for an eyewatering $375 million.

These acquisitions got us thinking. What drives deals in a market as intimate as the campus card industry?

Everyone from Forbes to Investopedia has an opinion when it comes to justifying an acquisition, but typically the list includes synergy, growth and the elimination of competition.

On the basis of synergy both Blackboard and Heartland have done well.

The addition of CardSmith advances Blackboard’s cloud-based portfolio and gives its sales team a solution that can serve smaller institutions more efficiently. For Heartland, meanwhile, the acquisition of TouchNet emboldens its payment offerings for the education market.

The latter acquisition is particularly synergistic, in that Heartland processes many of the transaction categories that TouchNet facilitates on campus. In the future, rather than outsourcing TouchNet transactions to a third-party processor they can keep the function within the family. The whole should be greater – and more profitable – than the sum of the parts.

Growth is another common goal of an acquisition, and both deals should deliver in both client base and revenue.

Acquiring a competitor can enable a company to increase market share without earning it the old-fashioned way. Rather than fighting client by client, RFP by RFP and sales call to sales call, a stable of new customers can be obtained overnight.

Higher education has a notoriously long sales cycle, with customers that tend to remain loyal to long-term contract agreements. This results in a slow turnover rate for campus contracts, and in the process, makes adding a swathe of campuses in one acquisition all the more attractive.

CardSmith’s revenue is certainly a welcome addition, but it’s the company’s client base that is potentially the bigger draw for Blackboard.

Heartland, meanwhile, stands to benefit from strong revenues and the massive market presence that TouchNet built over the last 25 years. As a publicly traded company, the revenue bump could have an immediate impact for Heartland assuming investors approve. But whether share prices reflect it or not, the deal takes Heartland from midsized to major player in the campus payments sector.

Then there’s the competition aspect. Acquiring a direct competitor not only removes that organization as a challenger to your market share, but it also has the “strike first” effect, ensuring that another interested organization doesn’t beat you to the punch.

While there are textbook motivations for an acquisition, only Blackboard and Heartland are privy to this plot. One thing is certain, however, in both campus cards and campus payments, the competitive playing field has narrowed.

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ID SHORTS HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE WEB

OREGON STUDENTS WANT RESOURCE NUMBERS ON BACK OF IDS Student ID cards vary in their design, with university crests, colors and photos all adorning the fronts these important credentials. The reverse side of the card, however is easy to overlook, as many institutions pre-print generic data that the student rarely notices.

Students at the University of Oregon are calling for its card office to use the back of their IDs to print valuable contact information that can aid students in a time of need. According to the Daily Emerald, the group spearheading the

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initiative is the University of Oregon’s Active Minds, a student group focused on increasing student awareness of mental health. The group provides information and resources that encourage Oregon students to seek help as soon they need it.

The group’s petition is calling for the Oregon card office to print campus resource numbers on the back of each student ID card. The group surveyed Oregon students to see which services they deem most beneficial to have printed on their IDs. Results show interest in the university police department, health center, Safe Ride and the after hours counseling and crisis hotline.

Active Minds hopes to have its cam-

paign approved by Oregon’s card office and have the numbers printed on the back of IDs starting fall 2014. The group is wisely asking that only newly issued credentials feature the numbers – roughly 3,800 IDs to be issued for the fall semester – rather than suggesting a reprint of all 25,000 Oregon student cards.

CARDPRESSO SOFTWARE NOW BUNDLED WITH EVOLIS PRINTERS Evolis is bundling card issuance software from Portugal-based cardPresso with its Zenius, Primacy and Quantum models. cardPresso is an application to design, print and encode ID badges. The basic version of cardPresso offers predefined templates, signature acquisition, WIA/ TWAIN and DirectShow acquisition as well as bar code printing and magnetic encoding.

“With cardPresso, we (are) delivering an end-to-end solution that combines a printer and its companion design software,” says Christophe Peraudeau, product marketing manager for Evolis. “cardPresso brings additional value to our range of printers, as well as increases business opportunities for both Evolis and its network of partners.” cardPresso offers six editions, spanning 18 languages, with each successive software version offering additional fea-

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tures. It enables the import of data files in a number of formats – txt, xls, xlxs and csv – and via ODBC links. The software is compatible with both Windows and Mac operating systems.

SANTANDER, GEMALTO LAUNCH NFC SERVICE ON MICROSD Gemalto partnered with Banco Santander’s Universities Global Division to issue the Optelio Contactless microSD solution to institutions in Spain, Brazil, Chile and Mexico, as part of the bank’s University Smart Card program.

The application is already running at a number of universities, with participating students, teachers and other personnel using their mobile phones for tasks like building access and ePurse payments.

Banco Santander will provide a mobile payment option that is integrated with its own mobile wallet app and intends to

use the NFC-capable microSD to deploy a range of services including mobile transit ticketing. The inclusion of NFC adds to the functionality of Banco Santander’s University Smart Card program, which is already used by more than 7.1 million people in more than 270 universities spanning 12 countries.

Gemalto handles the personalization, issuance services, the microSD cards and the multi-service wallet framework necessary for Banco Santander to create its own mobile app. The company’s Optelio Contactless microSD features 4GB of memory space that clients can use to store personal data such like photos and videos.

UC DAVIS ALLOWS STUDENT IDS TO FEATURE NON-LEGAL NAMES A student ID can verify an individual’s identity with a simple swipe, tap or scan,

NEW ENHANCEMENTS TO THE DATACARD SR200 AND SR300 RETRANSFER CARD PRINTERS INCLUDE MORE FACTORY-INSTALLED SMART CARD ENCODING MODULES

instantly tethering the person who presents the card to a user account on the backend system. But what happens when the cardholder no longer uses their legal name?

It’s a challenge that the University of California at Davis is meeting head on enabling students to have a non-legal name printed on their IDs. The university’s Preferred Name Program is acknowledging that an individual’s identity is just as much reflected in the moniker that they respond to as the information stored in the backend system.

The program was instituted following requests from UC Davis students, in an attempt to better accommodate transgender and foreign students who don’t use or respond to their given name.

UC Davis acknowledges that a preferred name should be used whenever possible throughout the student’s university experience – including university records.

While students have the freedom to select their preferred name, the university reserves the right to remove a moniker if it contains inappropriate or offensive language, or is being used for misrepresentation.

The university will allow any students wishing to identify with a preferred name to include it along with the legal name in university records. It is important to note that the student’s legal name is not being replaced, but rather the preferred name is being added to the student’s university record.

DATACARD RELEASES ENHANCEMENTS FOR RETRANSFER PRINTERS New enhancements to the Datacard SR200 and SR300 retransfer card printers include more factory-installed smart card encoding modules as well as fieldupgradeable encoding that can support various contact and contactless card

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ID SHORTS

types. There are also new configurations added to the Software Development Kits (SDKs) that provide tools for card design, secure card production and management of card programs.

Datacard’s retransfer card printers are used primarily by enterprises, universities and government agencies to issue full-color printed cards with over-theedge coverage. The SR200 model personalizes single-sided applications and the SR300 printer enables dual-sided printing. The printers retransfer technology to print on all standard card surfaces and materials, including blank or preprinted cards, PET, PET-G, polycarbonate and PVC cards.

HEARTLAND APP CREATES SINGLE POINT OF ACCESS TO CAMPUS LIFE With the contemporary college student and their smart phone attached at the hip, the use of mobile apps to fulfill daily tasks like door access, laundry and vending has become the new trend.

Heartland Campus Solutions is providing solution to match this trend via its OneCard Mobile app. The new app represents the consolidation of secure payments, virtual ID and physical access to facilities, events and information. It has already been piloted at a number of colleges and universities.

“Why not create a mobile app that combines a secure, pre-paid mobile

payment system with student ID functionality that provides convenience to students, peace of mind to parents, and a helping hand to administrators looking to streamline operations?” asks Melissa Peirano, general manager of Heartland’s OneCard program.

In addition to cutting paperwork and supporting a greener campus, OneCard Mobile also provides more data to administrators, enabling them to automate information to be shared with students and their parents. The app is configurable with most pre-existing Heartland OneCard platforms, with variable pricing structures based on a university’s desired functionality.

“Campus administrators like the optimization of operations that OneCard

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ID SHORTS

Mobile provides,” says Fred Emery, vice president of sales for Heartland Campus Solutions. “They can configure the app to offer as much functionality as they’d like, and add new features as they go. Anything with a URL can be easily added.”

For the student, OneCard Mobile provides a hub of campus information along with a means to make payments and gain access to campus dorms and academic buildings. Parents can leverage the app as well, with the ability to control how much money is placed on their student’s pre-paid, OneCard account.

To make a payment, students can select any participating point-of-sale terminal from their phone, and swipe their finger across their card image to validate the

transaction. Students can also conduct remote payments by selecting a terminal on a map or by entering the terminal’s number in the app.

The app contains the student’s ID card image and bar code, which can be scanned and used for checking out materials from a library or other campus resource centers.

For physical access control, the app is supported by geo-fencing technology, which ensures that a student is in close proximity to the door they intend to enter.

This feature automatically sends an onscreen notification to the student as they approach the door, giving them a prompt to unlock the door.

THE SYSTEM FEATURES 500 ONLINE ACCESS POINTS WITH SALTO XS4 ELECTRONIC WIRELESS LOCKS AND 80 GATEWAYS

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VIENNA UNIVERSITY DEPLOYS SALTO ACCESS CONTROL SYSTEM Austria’s Vienna University of Economics and Business is electronically securing 4,500-access points and 64,000 users across its campus with the help of SALTO Systems.

SALTO and local distributor ESSECCA designed and implemented a physical access control system for campus buildings and rooms. The centerpiece of the system is an interface for an external database, specifically tailored for Vienna University. With this interface, all personal data and access rights are automatically trans-

ID SHORTS

ferred into the access control system in real-time during registration.

The system includes 2,500 offline access points equipped with SALTO’s XS4 electronic locks. Additionally, the system features 500 online access points with XS4 electronic wireless locks and 80 gateways.

ESSECCA developed the interface that automates access control, as well as supplied all door components – electronic and mechanical locks, panic bars, electronic and mechanical escutcheons – integrated controllers and coordinated the installation process.

The project is valued at €492 million and spans six new complexes – each consisting of multiple buildings – on the Vienna University campus.

SALTO’s SVN platform underpins the company’s suite of standalone networked lock solutions, enabling for online and real-time access control. SALTO hardware and software solutions can be networked without the use of wires and can provide real-time intelligence and control to improve the access control management functions.

UBAND OPENS NEW POSSIBILITIES FOR CONTACTLESS ON CAMPUS IDenticard is rethinking the way contactless is used on college campuses with the release of UBand, a contactless access solution in the form of a wristband.

Wearable tech has seen a surge in adoption recently, running the gamut of uses and applications, and IDenticard’s UBand silicone wristband features a built-in MIFARE contactless chip. It can be used for residence hall or classroom access, payment at campus dining locations, printer authorization in campus libraries and more.

The idea behind the Uband is simple; it provides students with a comfortable, ever-present form of access while elimi-

nating the need to carry a card. Moreover, with the capability to perform multiple functions, UBand could make for a great compliment to a campus’ existing ID card.

UBand is already in use for both access and contactless payments at Mohawk College in Hamilton, Ontario, where university staff are reporting that students were eagerly receptive to the wearable credential’s comfort and convenience.

“The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive,” says Troy Heath, the executive director of business development and retail at Mohawk College, about the implementation of UBand. “The ease and convenience of the wristband makes everyday tasks like paying for coffee and accessing rooms exciting. No more worrying about where your purse or wallet are when everything you need is on your wrist.”

Available in 20 colors and three sizes, the UBand can be custom-printed with text or a graphic to match a university’s desired brand.

ASSA ABLOY, ADIRONDACK TO PROVIDE INTEGRATED CAMPUS SECURITY ASSA ABLOY’s PERSONA Campus and Adirondack Solutions are partnering to coordinate security and electronic access

control functions across Adirondack’s housing, parking administration, conference coordination and data interfacing services.

PERSONA Campus is a flexible access control solution that provides both seamless database integration, as well as a software interface that is compatible with a number of popular enterprise, transaction and housing systems. The system is compatible with a variety of offline, Power over Ethernet (PoE) and Wi-Fi locksets from ASSA ABLOY’s Corbin Russwin and SARGENT brands.

Adirondack Solutions’ product suite includes a range of housing and security products that includes residential management, conference and meeting calendar software, conduct case management software, parking administrator software and the company’s Data Interface Module that enables integration with other campus systems.

Explore online for up-to-the-minute news and insight on identity and security technologies for the campus and university market. Articles, podcasts and videos are added daily at CR80News.com

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Say ‘Cheese’ Online photo submission eases card office burden

ANDREW HUDSON, ASSOCIATE EDITOR, AVISIAN PUBLICATIONS

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We’ve all been there. Whether it’s a bad hair day, a stain on your shirt, the dreaded blink or just an ugly smile, everyone has had a bad experience on picture day.

But what if there were a way to avoid this age-old embarrassment altogether?

What if you could guarantee the pictureperfect ID photo? Well, you can.

Universities nationwide are starting to enable their students to self-submit their ID card photos online. It’s a practice that’s not only giving students a controlled freedom over the likeness that appears on their ID card, but it’s also helping to streamline card office processes for universities large and small.

The question may become not whether to enable online submission, but whether to build an in-house solution or purchase a system from a third-party vendor.

THE BACKDROP The University of Nebraska at Lincoln has been offering online photo submission since 2009 thanks to a system developed by internal university IT resources. Despite slow initial adoption, the card office hasn’t looked back.

“Prior to self-submitted photos, students came in for new student enrollment with their parents,” says Julie Yardley, manager of the University of Nebraska’s NCard Office. “During that orientation event, group leaders would take roughly 20 students at a time and bring them to the card office where we would take a photo, print the card and issue the photo ID to the student before they left the office.”

Working in a university card office in between June and August is hardly an enviable position. School may be out for most students, but for a campus card office the summer months are more akin to a late season push for the playoffs than a summer vacation – a sentiment that is echoed by Yardley.

“During orientation, there were days when we had between 250-300 students visit the card office in a day,” says Yardley.

“It takes the printers about two minutes to print a card, so you’re dealing with a time constraint – plus the printers get hot and have to cool down a bit.”

There are 25,000 students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and between graduate, international and new student enrollment – along with the Nebraska’s dental, nursing and law colleges – Yardley estimates that the NCard office will serve about 6,500 new students over the course of the summer.

“We start printing cards for the summer by the end of April, with the last-minute photo submission rush happening around the first week of June,” Yardley explains.

It’s this rush at orientation where online photo submission pays dividends for card office employees. “In August we have a ton of people that would have to come to the office because there wasn’t another way to get their photo to us,” Yardley explains.

“It made an already chaotic month even worse.”

“If even half of those students submitted their photo online, you’re saving wear and tear on the printer by not producing 250 photos and printing the same number of cards in a single day,” she explains.

Once a university makes the decision to offer online photo submission, the trick is getting students to use it. Without widespread adoption, the job of the card office employee remains just as challenging as ever.

As Yardley explains, a turning point for the online photo submission program at

application and reports tremendous adoption rates.

For Jeanine Brooks, director of the Action Card at the University of Alabama, the decision to build an in-house solution just made sense. “It allowed us to utilize campus resources – existing servers, application access via campus portal as well as the university’s trained and knowledgeable personnel.”

An in-house solution also gave the card office flexibility for expansion, the ability to quickly react to requested process changes and easy integration with the student information system, she adds.

“Online photo submission enables us to allocate our resources throughout the summer appropriately. Before we had a time crunch,” says Brooks. “Now we have photos coming in daily, so we can spread the work out and reduce overtime.”

Brooks cites a tight relationship with campus IT as being pivotal to the building, maintenance and growth of Alabama’s online photo submission system.

At the end of year three of photo submission, 91% of incoming Alabama freshmen were submitting their ID photos online. It’s an impressive statistic when you consider the size of the university – 34,582 students enrolled and 70,000 active cardholders.

Including parents in checklist reminders has proven vital to increasing online photo

ONLINE PHOTO SUBMISSION ENABLES US TO ALLOCATE RESOURCES THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER – WE HAVE PHOTOS COMING IN DAILY, SO WE SPREAD WORK OUT AND REDUCE OVERTIME Nebraska was the inclusion of new student enrollment. “Now, when every new student enrolls, they automatically get an email telling them that they can submit their ID photos online along with the link to our website.”

SWEET HOME ALABAMA The University of Alabama is in its fourth year using its in-house photo submission

submissions, Brooks says. Staff found that the best time for reminders was one to two weeks prior to an orientation session, with specific emphasis that photo upload is required before the session.

It’s rare, however for a student to check their email on a daily basis, so Brooks also used social media, mobile apps, texts and phone calls to spread the word about online photo submission.

In the near future, Alabama has plans to launch a mobile app for orientation and

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use it as a means to further inform students of the online photo submission process.

Using the smart phone app will enable the card office to leverage pop-up reminders, social media connections and in-app to-do lists to make sure students are informed in advance.

launched the new system, the adoption rate has surpassed 80%.

Staff strategically opted to launch the new product in the middle of a semester.

“Any school looking to adopt a system like this will find that it can be very disrup-

BUILDING AN IN-HOUSE SOLUTION ISN’T WITHOUT ITS CHALLENGES, AS BOTH MONETARY AND RESOURCE COSTS CAN BE DAUNTING

BUILDING IN-HOUSE Liberty University sees roughly 3,000 students at the beginning of each academic year – 1,600 of whom participate in orientation programs. For the Lynchburg, Vir.-based institution, the convenience of self-submitted photos has been a blessing.

In 2012, Liberty decided to rewrite its photo submission program, citing the prior version’s poor user interface and low student adoption. Since Liberty card services

OVEREXPOSED

LOW QUALITY

tive to card service operations,” explains Tony Erskine, senior IT developer at Liberty University. “To attempt it in August would be folly.”

Liberty set a target date of October, knowing card services would get a trickle of students in the beginning so that the load on the system could be increased steadily over time.

OUT OF FOCUS

CORRECT

Smile for the camera: Submission do’s and don’ts While a vast majority of students follow the guidelines and parameters set forth by their university card offices, there remains the small percentage of students who test the limits.

All of the universities that provided comment for this story reported seeing similar mistakes made by students, with overall photo rejection rates ranging from 10% to 20% of total submissions.

The primary issues with unacceptable submissions consist of out of focus photos or photos taken with an improper background or lighting.

Notably, however, there seems to be a trend where students are submitting their professionally taken high school photos. These photos may be rife with artistic quality, but they are often black and white, taken with a filter or cropped in a way that renders them unusable.

MyPhoto’s AJ Jacubenta recalls one puzzling submission at Emory University where a female student uploaded a group photo of herself and three friends. To avoid confusion, the student circled her face in the group photo to indicate which likeness was to be used on the ID card.

To aid in quality control, MyPhoto displays examples of unacceptable photos to help students determine if their submission will fly before they click the upload button.

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“Online photo submission adds the convenience of 24/7 customer service because students aren’t tied to Liberty’s card office hours of operation,” says Deborah Nightingale, director of card services at Liberty University. “Its also an operational

advantage in that it alleviates the number of students that have to visit the office.”

Nightingale says the in-house development was key to the system’s success.

“Important to the process was card services’ engagement while the application was being built,” says Erskine. “Card services did not simply provide a list of requirements, they participated actively in the process to ensure that IT was solving the correct problems.”

The system enables admins to send tailored emails to students detailing the problems with a submitted photo. “The messages aren’t generated manually,” says Erskine. “The denial process has checkboxes for all the guidelines and students will get a bulleted list of where they went wrong with their submitted photo.”

On the backend, meanwhile, there are pre-created list of reasons for denying a photo, with admins having the ability to add or remove reasons on the fly. The user interface also makes sorting submissions easy for campus card employees, something that Nightingale sees as a luxury.

“Photo submissions can be sorted by date of when cards need to be mailed out or picked up, which enables card services personnel to see which card requests are more pressing or urgent,” says Nightingale.

Students, meanwhile, have the ability to crop photos at the time of submission, and once card services receives the photo, card office employees have the ability to re-crop if necessary.

Erskine explains that building an inhouse solution isn’t without its challenges, and both monetary and resource costs can be daunting. He stresses that a university must consider these costs before attempting to build out their own solution.

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‘Selfies’ with CBORD station” in the orientation residence hall for those students who didn’t submit their photos prior to arriving for orientation.

Using a simple white backdrop and a QR code linking to the GET site, students sit in front of the backdrop, snap their own photo using a smartphone and then scan the QR code to upload their photos to GET. Cards are then printed in the SUNYCard office and delivered back to the students in the residence hall later that same day.

Campus card vendor CBORD joined the photo upload market, enabling its university clients to streamline issuance processes.

The new solution is available now, with the University of Buffalo and the State University of New York at Albany leading the selfie charge.

At the University of Buffalo, students can visit the aptly named SendUsYourSelfie.com to skip the lines at the card office.

“Most students see their ID card as their stamp of approval. Once they have it in their hand, they are true college students,” says Webster. “The students that took advantage of our ‘Selfie Time’ photo upload experience prior to coming to campus got that satisfaction within minutes of arriving for orientation.”

“Using Sendusyourselfie.com saved us time and labor processing photos. We received up to 70% of photos in advance in each of our eight orientations,” says Martha McIlroy, card manager at the University of Buffalo.

“Then on the morning of orientation we continued the selfie process throughout check-in using tablets and having students use the site. This brought us up to 99% of all photos completed and cards printed without students standing in line at the card office.”

Overall, the photo upload experience at SUNY Albany has been a positive one, with a growing number of students deciding to submit their photos in advance. “Our first experience with using the GET online photo submission for summer orientation was extremely successful,” says Michelle Schifley, senior director of administration at SUNY Albany. “Since the program’s inception, 56% of students pre-loaded photos and received their SUNYCard at orientation check-in.”

According to Keith Curtachio, IT director at the University of Buffalo, SendUsYourSelfie. com is part technology and part marketing initiative.

“We found that the cameras in today’s tablets and smart phones are great for ID photos and students are comfortable with taking good photos with their mobile devices,” explains Curtachio. “It just seems natural and keeps the process easy and informal.”

Elsewhere, SUNY Albany decided to implement online photo uploads using the CBORD GET platform. Once a student uploads their photo, the SUNYCard team reviews and approves the photos, prints cards for each orientation group and delivers the printed cards to the appropriate residence hall. It’s a process that SUNYCard staff believes is not only more convenient, but more engaging for students as well.

“Because of GET online photo submission, we significantly increased our one-on-one interaction times with students and parents this year,” says Sharon Webster, director of SUNYCard. “Instead of wasting time in long photo lines, students and parents were able to ask questions and receive direct guidance from SUNYCard staff in a more relaxed, freeflowing environment.”

As an added utility for the upload system, the university decided to set up a “selfie

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The remaining students received assistance from SUNYCard team members at check-in using iPads to take the ID card headshots. “We averaged about three minutes per student, and the cards were handed out as they arrived for lunch,” says Schifley.

As Schifley explains, instituting GET’s online photo submission tool at orientation had many benefits.

“It opened up an estimated two hours for other programming, eliminated tedious lines in offices and dormitories and our SUNYCard team was able to provide additional support to the orientation staff by answering questions, providing directions, and just making people feel welcome and comfortable,” Schifley explains. “Those initial, personal interactions are very important and memorable for students and their families.”

CBORD campus clients can use either the company’s CS Gold Web Manager, which is specific to CS Gold, or the newer GET solution that is available for both CS Gold and Odyssey PCS/Odyssey Direct.

“The technical learning curve was steep and posed a challenge to IT,” Erskine explains. “It’s a big application and some of the members of the IT team were relatively junior – so there was a reasonably high labor cost in getting everybody up to speed.”

IN THE MAIL As with other universities, Liberty sends emails to students that direct them to the photo upload application. Once there, student initiates the process by creating a card request.

At Liberty, however, students have the option to have their printed ID card sent to their home or permanent address before they ever set foot on campus for orientation.

It’s an interesting take on the ID issuance process that Liberty has built directly into its photo upload process.

“They upload the photo that they selected along with a scanned image of their drivers license or other government ID,” explains Erskine. “Then the student decides how they want to receive their card – pick up at card services or mailed to them at home – and finally agree to card services terms and conditions.”

Mailing IDs prior to a student’s arrival on campus introduces new challenges in ID vetting. To safeguard this process, several data points are examined.

“Students must first be authenticated with Liberty’s single sign-on system to prove that the student is who they say they are,” says Erskine. “The next step is to upload a photo of their government ID, which card services examines to make sure that the ID photo matches the actual person.”

As an added precaution, Nightingale insists that Liberty does not mail ID cards to any address that isn’t already in the university’s banner system; only approved school addresses, permanent home addresses or the like. Nightingale explains that the cards that are mailed to students at home are sent in an inactive state, leaving the student to activate the card once it arrives to their home address.

It seems to be a popular option as Nightingale estimates that some 9,000 students received their IDs in the mail as of fall 2012.

GOING OFF CAMPUS If building a solution in house doesn’t sound like an attractive option, there are alternatives. Enter MyPhoto.

MyPhoto is a Web-based photo upload application developed to specifically to streamline student photo submissions.

It’s a solution that could put this valuable service within reach for campuses of all shapes and sizes without the need to devote internal developer resources.

“We’ve found that universities need a better way of getting their photo IDs to students, and the MyPhoto app helps with that issuance,” says Alan Jacubenta, owner of MyPhoto and parent company Mango Bay Internet.

Jacubenta started the Cleveland-based Mango Bay Internet in 1997, to provide website development, Internet marketing and IT solutions. It wasn’t until he was approached by Emory University in 2010, however, that he discovered the need for a reliable online photo submission application.

“We did some research, proposed a solution based on what Emory University needed, and we came up with a five-step process,” Jacubenta explains. As of August of 2013, he says Emory reported a 95% acceptance rate amongst incoming freshmen.

THE FIVE-STEP PROCESS Anyone who deals with 18-year-old college students knows that in order for them to participate a system has to be quick, easy and painless, an idea that Jacubenta had in mind when developing the MyPhoto process.

When a student first visits the MyPhoto portal, they are greeted with the detailed instructions of the upload process. “We realize that most students aren’t going to read this, but for the few who do take the time, we outline the entire process in detail,” says Jacubenta.

The second step is to login with a university account. “Once the student logs in, we pre-populate our application with some data from the institution – first and last name, email address and in some cases

the school the student will be attending,” explains Jacubenta.

The third step sees the student select their desired photo, crop and edit it via the interface that enables them to modify the photo to the specifications from the university. Once the student has successfully cropped and edited their photo, they are asked to confirm that they are satisfied with the selection to complete step four.

He notes that built-in cropping is something of a Holy Grail for online photo submission. As an added level of quality control, MyPhoto can display a set of unacceptable photos to better aid the student in cropping and selection.

“We can also place a sample university ID photo next to the submission window so that the student can compare and match the aspect ratio and dimensions of the photo to best meet the university’s parameters,” says Jacubenta.

The final step is to issue the student a tracking number, which matches their university-issued student ID number. For peace of mind, the student can check the status of their photo at anytime throughout the process.

While this may seem like a lengthy process, it can take as little as two minutes.

BEHIND THE CAMERA While online photo submission is designed to be a student-facing system, the campus card administrator’s experience is equally important. The system will only be as efficient as the people who have to use it, and as Jacubenta explains, the card office administrator has not been overlooked.

“The approve/deny process is user friendly. It shows not only the student’s submission but is also accompanied by a thumbnail of the photo,” explains Jacubenta. “The solution also features search and archival functions that enable administrators to sort submissions by name, pending status of the submitted photo, the semester in which the student will be arriving on campus as well as what college the student will be attending.”

The administrator can conduct a search using any of these parameters and export that queried list to an Excel document.

In addition to sending custom email messages directly from the application dashboard, the cropping tool is also made available to the administrator for lastminute edits. Jacubenta explains that a number of universities offering self-submitted photos still require system admins to manually crop photos outside the photo upload system, rather than within the application itself.

“Our software enables a card office admin to crop a photo without having to take the photo out to external editing software,” says Jacubenta. “This is great for those photos that only require slight adjustments or cropping, as it saves time in the editing process on the part of the admin.”

Another control feature of MyPhoto is the ability for the master admin to issue and manage the privileges of sub admin accounts. This gives a card office the ability to allow multiple employees to interact with the system and approve photos.

The first thing the admin sees when logging in to the MyPhoto dashboard is a quick view of any status-pending photos in the system. According to Jacubenta, admin users will typically go in and mass approve these photos, with the exception of the few unacceptable ones. There is also an “archive all” option that enables the admin to clear the dashboard of photo submissions at the end of a semester, a la spring cleaning.

A FOCUSED SOLUTION Paying for a third-party solution doesn’t necessarily mean forfeiting creative control over your application. In fact, the team at MyPhoto strives to do just the opposite, giving the university as much or as little control over the creation of their photo upload portal as they desire.

Jacubenta works with each implementation individually, tailoring the MyPhoto solution to each university and its specific requirements.

While LDAP and Active Directory integrations are included in the base price of

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the MyPhoto application, special requests are common.

As an example, MyPhoto has been integrated with Oracle databases following specific client requests, he explains.

The one-time license fee is currently set at $9874, with annual maintenance, support and update packages available as add-ons. “We feel that the cost of our solution versus the cost of assets to build this system internally, gives us a really good offering and a competitive price point,” says Jacubenta.

The application is customized to match the institution’s website. Once a design has been approved and technical requirements addressed, the site is made live. The entire process, start to finish, takes about four to six weeks pending any special requirements or implementation challenges, says Jacubenta.

LOOKING DOWN THE LENS MyPhoto is also looking at adding features to the application. In the future Jacubenta is contemplating the ability to turn the dashboard off completely, giving a university the power to cut off photo submissions at a certain date and time. He is also considering built-in metrics and reporting functions that could show a card office admin the time and cost savings resulting from the online submissions.

The system already supports photo uploads from desktop or laptop computers as well as from smart phones and tablets. Advancing the mobile compatibility will be a continued priority in the future.

PICTURE PERFECT

Snapshot: SUNY Albany students love the selfie Total students at the 12 summer orientation sessions: 3240 Students who uploaded photos prior to arrival: 1800 (56%) Students who uploaded photos during orientation check in: 1440 (44%)

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While online photo submission seems a no-brainer, it is vital that a university consider the options at its disposal.

Building a solution in house is great for those universities with plenty of resources, capital and strong relationships between card services and campus IT. This method can pay dividends when the right personnel are employed, but can be costly in both labor and resources.

For card offices that may not have developer resources at their disposal, companies like MyPhoto offer a viable, plug-and-play alternative that provides a comparable solution without the upkeep.

Whether the decision is made to support photo submission via an in-house or a third-party solution, it can provide a great customer service and reduce the burden on card office staff. It is a great way to spread the issuance workload out over slower summer months, allowing personnel to better focus efforts as students arrive on campus.

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Debate continues as feds consider campus banking crackdown Politicking ensues as rulemaking process falls short As universities start the new academic year, questions remains about the campus ID’s relationship to banking institutions and third party servicers as potential regulations from the U.S. Department of Education (DoED) loom large.

The DoED scrutiny, which is in a state of flux and confusion, has led to examination from other federal interests as well. The Senate banking committee met at the close of July to consider student lending, debt refinancing and student loans, all of which reside at the heart of a policy-driven examination of the campus banking relationship.

BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO At the core of its rulemaking process, the DoED has made clear its intent to restructure, at least in some manner, the relationship between a student, their university and a bank partner or third party servicer. Spurred on in no small part by consumer advocacy groups including U.S. PIRG and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the DoED initiated a Negotiated Rulemaking Process to consider new regulations to oversee these relationships.

This process spanned several months in the spring of 2014 and included representatives from consumer advocacy groups, financial services and higher education institutions. Unanimous agreement was required between all parties and on all issues for the results to be accepted and put forth for regulatory approval, and from the beginning consensus seemed almost unimaginable.

The group included representatives from both ends of the spectrum – from US PIRG to Higher One – and it was apparent from the start that oil and water would need to mix to find common ground.

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Surprisingly, many participants reported that the opposing sides seemed to reach hard fought, yet considerate compromise on virtually every issue.

Still, in the eleventh hour, unanimous agreement fell short on the definition of sponsored accounts.

“We were very close to having an agreement,” says Brian Tate, director of government relations at the Network Branded Prepaid Card Association. “The representatives from the financial services sector were able to come together to make a substantive offer to the DoED and the consumer groups, but the consumer groups still did not like it.”

He believes that the Department of Education was surprised that financial institutions gave in as much as they did.

Yet this was not enough for consensus.

“It appears that the consumer groups do not want to acknowledge the benefits our products provide to students and schools and their only solution is for these agreements to be discontinued, which will result in fewer options for students,” Tate says.

Still, others found promise in the level of cooperation among disparate groups.

“It was an incredibly difficult proposition to expect such divergent interests to agree on every item, but the level of progress and cooperation was impressive,” says

Jeff Staples, vice president market development at Blackboard Transact. “We are confident that if the interests of the student remain the central focus, the right decisions can still be made to ensure that quality services and student choice do not become mutually exclusive.”

Since the close of the negotiated rulemaking, however, the process and discussions have become less transparent, heightening concerns about who is driving the conversation and the direction it’s heading.

The consumer groups maintain that because the funds being disbursed are Federal money, no student should incur any fees when using that money. Insiders suggest there are some within the DoED who are onboard with the sentiment.

“I am hearing that opposition is coming from the highest levels of the department,” says Tate. “It seems there is a goal to uncouple these relationships; Department of Education reps said this during the meetings.”

Decoupling the university-bank relationship could come from an outright ban or by piling on burdensome regulation.

This would make these relationships so difficult or unprofitable that no outcome, short of financial servicers walking away from higher education, would be possible.

NBPCA urges institutions to get involved Contact your congressman, senator or governor. Implore them to specifically identify the problem they are seeking to resolve. Ask that the DoED conduct a thorough cost/benefits analysis to quantify the impact any proposed solution may have on institutions and students.

Correspond with the DoED directly, and ask for the data that is driving this decision. Many feel that to this point, there has been only weak anecdotal data.

Consult media outlets and tell the story of how these regulations will impact your institution and your students.

IF NOT THE OPEN MARKET, THEN WHO? If financial service providers don’t participate in the disbursement of financial aid and credit balances, who will? Some involved in the process from the start suggest that if the DoED has its way, Uncle Sam will take over the role via a federally-issued card product similar to the prepaid cards provided by the IRS and Social Security Administration.

And if this doesn’t happen, the proposed regulations could take all financial aid disbursement back to the age of paper, forcing universities to figure out how to issue checks to students once again.

“When we started these campus card and bank relationships in 1993, we had three objectives: reduce the administrative workload, eliminate student lines and expedite delivery of excess aid to students,” says Bill Norwood, Chief Architect, Heartland Campus Solutions. “It is hard to believe after 21 years we are going backwards or possibly considering turning this process over to a government card.”

It’s a puzzling demand, as the government has long acknowledged that electronic payments are not only cheaper, but also more secure than paper checks.

According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s web site, electronic payments cost the U.S. government nearly 10 times less than a paper check. Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service web site notes, “Electronic Funds Transfer is safe, secure, efficient, and less expensive than paper check payments and collections.”

Why would other federal agencies be heading in the opposite direction?

“It makes no sense, from a policy standpoint, to push students to a higher cost form of payment that also carries a higher susceptibility to fraud,” says Tate.

He cites the Social Security Administration as one of a series of government agencies that has taken the op-

posite approach, pushing from checks to electronic payments. “SSA has mandated electronic payments for the cost savings aspect, so why would DoED seek to move backwards towards checks?” he asks.

Blackboard’s Staples notes that some options in the market today are already cost free for the student and the government. “We have already demonstrated that we can deliver greater value and access with no cost to the vast majority of our cardholders and zero cost to the federal government,” he says.

Furthermore, he stresses that the private sector is motivated to continuously innovate in order to provide a compelling option to the student. “That means more access points, cardholder protection and benefits (e.g. zero liability and health care benefits), and mobile options that the students demand and deserve,” he adds.

WHERE’S THE DATA? The issue seems policy driven rather than empirically based. Opponents argue that there is virtually no data behind the claims supporting proposed regulations.

According to the GAO report, there are 850 schools with financial relationships that have come to be considered sponsored accounts. But, as Tate points out, the GAO report looked at only nine institutions, while the U.S. DoED’s Inspector General Report, entitled “ThirdParty Servicer Use of Debit Cards to Deliver Title IV Funds,” looked at just four as both studies found fault with the arrangements. “It doesn’t make sense to extrapolate that to the entirety of the higher education sector from less than one-half of one percent,” he says.

The data cited by the consumer groups as evidence of the evils of these relationships, while potentially relevant, is certainly far from statistically significant.

Rather than take the GAO and DoED’s Inspector General reports as indicative of the whole spectrum, insiders suggest that legislators and taxpayers should expect the Department of Education to inde-

pendently examine the actual campus banking landscape.

To this point, however, officials seem to have relied on these two studies that were not representative of the full landscape, but rather focused on a few select outlier instances.

LOOKING FORWARD Despite the frustration and lack of agreement overall, Tate maintains a sense of optimism that something good can come from the Negotiated Rulemaking process. “I think we made a lot of progress. I hope the Department of Education takes that into consideration,” he says. “The financial institutions and third party servicers negotiated in good faith with the consumer groups. I hope that is reflected in anything the Department puts out.”

To achieve that goal, Tate reveals his ambitions for the road ahead.

“Before releasing any new regulations, I expect that the department would have consulted with financial and bank regulators – the Office of Comptroller of Currency, Federal Reserve, FDIC and others – as this issue crosses over many jurisdictions,” he says. “I think the discussions we started in rulemaking should be extended and continued.”

Advances in technology and processes should be welcomed rather than feared.

“In the last five years we’ve seen staggering growth in offerings and value,” says Staples.

He says that five years ago the lowest cost, greatest access offerings in financial aid credit balance delivery didn’t exist, nor did open loop prepaid debit in the higher education market. “These enhancements emerge, not as an answer to regulation,” he stresses. “Instead they’re driven by advances in technology and competition to solve a problem.”

“It’s exciting to imagine what will be available to students in the next five years,” he concludes. “Here’s hoping the pace of innovation is allowed to continue unabated.”

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Off-campus merchant programs Exploring self-op,vendor-managed options ZACK MARTIN, EDITOR, AVISIAN PUBLICATIONS

Off-campus programs inhabit an odd place for colleges and universities. Institutions can sometimes build a modest revenue stream from these programs and students seem to enjoy using their student ID card at places beyond the campus.

But on-campus food service and retail locations have not always been thrilled, arguing that off-campus options can siphon money away from them. This concern has waned in recent years, however, as evidence emerged supporting the notion that with more choice comes more spend across the range of acceptance points.

Some campuses run these programs internally – identifying the merchants, deploying terminals and cutting checks or electronically settling. Others outsource the service to a campus-card provider or other third-party servicer.

Both options are viable, but come with their own considerations. With the outsourced model, for instance, campuses might see a smaller share of the fees paid by participating merchants, while universities that run their systems in house could have to hire additional staff to run the program.

Marketing; staffing; terminal deployment and maintenance; customer support; settling, reporting and reconciliation are all areas that should be considered when evaluating which way to head.

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UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT The Catcard services office at the University of Vermont is a busy place, serving 12,000 students and 2,500 faculty and staff at its Burlington, Vt. campus. The off-campus program started in 1999 with a takeout restaurant, pizza parlor and juice bar, says Amy Suprenant, business manager for the Catcard Service Center.

The university now has 107 merchants on board and runs off-campus programs for four other neighboring colleges. “We have everything from taxis, retail stores and a dentist,” Suprenant says. “We didn’t just want food options.”

The program includes three large supermarkets in the area, the last of which came on board this year. Fast food, convenience stores and groceries are the top three merchant categories, Suprenant says.

Leading up to the original launch there were some concerns about students using their campus ID and declining balance account to buy alcohol or tobacco products.

To at least ease this concern, restaurants and merchants with more than 51% of sales from alcohol are not eligible to participate in the program.

Even with the popularity of the offcampus options, on-campus sales have not suffered. Suprenant says 55% of purchases are still being made on campus, on-campus

dining levels continue to grow and they haven’t seen a drop off.

The university’s CatScratch program is used for off-campus purchases, for vending and to make other purchases on campus, Suprenant says. Students can deposit funds on the card at the card office, at one of the many kiosks around campus or online.

Students are charged a $3 convenience fee if they add funds online.

At its peak in 2008 the university saw deposits of $1.8 million into the accounts but that has dropped to average around $1.2 million in recent years. “We attribute the drop off to the bad economy and the campus’s decision to start accepting credit and debit cards,” she explains.

Merchants that want to participate in the program must fill out an application.

If accepted, the merchant pays a $250 setup fee, and is charged 6% for every purchase Suprenant says. Merchants get monthly statements and all accounts are reconciled on the 15th of every month.

The success of the university’s program sparked nearby colleges to come calling to see if they could get on board. Vermont hosts the same off-campus programs for nearby Saint Michael’s, Champlain and Norwich colleges – another 6,700 students in total.

The university does its best to educate incoming students about the program

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Off-Campus Solutions closes up shop While off-campus programs are growing on many fronts, one provider of the service, Sodexo-subsidiary Off-Campus Solutions, closed up shop early in 2014.

In 2011, CR80News reported that the company was servicing more than 60 institutions.

Insiders say that most of the campuses that were still contracted with Off-Campus Solutions turned to their campus card provider to take over operations.

As an example, Blackboard reported a significant uptick in the number of off-campus programs it was taking over this summer, says Pedro Marzo, senior director of market development for financial services at Blackboard. He estimates that Blackboard took over half of Off-Campus Solutions’ total accounts.

during orientation as well as promote the program throughout the academic year.

The card office has weekly “Friday freebies” for anyone who likes the program’s Facebook page. They are also exploring the idea of coupon books and a loyalty or rewards program for students.

While running its own off-campus program might see daunting, the university has only good things to say about the experience. “There’s really no downside, it’s nothing but pros,” Suprenant says.

ALBION COLLEGE Located in central Michigan, Albion College decided to contract with CardSmith for an off-campus program, says Jordan Rich, director of information and user services at the college. Albion was already deploying a CardSmith campus card program, including door access and on-campus dining, and decided that the addition of an off-campus program just made sense.

The 1,400-student college has 15 merchants signed up, Rich says. The school identified specific merchants it wanted to include, and CardSmith pursued others.

“We disapproved a couple local merchants who tried to join because they were liquor stores,” he adds.

Merchants are charged between 3% and 5% of each purchase, Rich says. They also have to purchase a separate point-of-sale terminal that only accepts the Albion ID. Albion students making purchases at the store have to go to that specific line to make their purchases.

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Dining plans are separate from Albion’s Briton Bucks declining balance accounts, Rich explains. This eased concerns that the college’s on-campus food services had about losing money to the new off-campus program. Briton Bucks are also used for laundry, vending and other on campus purposes.

The program is popular on campus, with 70% of students funding the Briton Bucks account, Rich says. There is typically around $300,000 in accounts at any one time during the school year.

Albion rolled out the programs to improve the student experience, Rich says.

“We also wanted to integrate the community more into campus,” he adds.

WILLIAM PATERSON UNIVERSITY OF NEW JERSEY It’s been nine-years since William Paterson University of New Jersey rolled out its off-campus program with CBORD, says Tino Rexach, IT and Enterprise Network Services at the university. Today, there are 21 merchants participating in the program, Rexach says.

As with Albion, community outreach seems to be a priority for Paterson, as outside of a McDonald’s, 7-11 and CVS, all other off-campus participants are local merchants.

The initial reasoning for an off-campus program at William Paterson was born out of necessity. The student union was going to be closed for six to 12 months for reconstruction and school officials wanted

to offer options for student dining. Looking off campus to help feed them seemed the best option.

The university now offers students a few options for dining, Rexach explains.

They have dining halls with all-you-can-eat options and a food court. The university offers both meal plans that enable a student to get a certain number of meals each day in the dining halls, as well as a declining balance account that can be used at the food court or in the off-campus program.

The university is using CBORD’s GET Funds and GET Food, online and mobile software applications. Following the successful pilot, online and mobile food ordering service will roll out to all students in the fall, Rexach says.

The service is basically a GrubHub type service, tailored specifically for William Paterson, and offering both on- and offcampus food options. The students will be able to open an app on their mobile or go to a web site, see the dining options and menus, place an order and pay with their campus card.

William Paterson helped beta test some of the early versions with CBORD and saw success with the pilot, Rexach says. “Within three months, three of the merchants were seeing more traffic with GET Food than with GrubHub,” he explains.

The university will be promoting the new features during orientation for incoming students and heavily this fall when students return to campus. The institution already offers a mobile app for students to use, and the online food ordering system will be added to increase the app’s functionality.

Whether a university decides to run its own program or outsource to a campus card provider or other servicer, off-campus programs seem to be something the student expects rather than an added bonus.

Moreover, the advent of mobile and online ordering seems likely to expand these programs to new heights in both convenience and usage as students gain the ability to use their campus ID in new ways and at more locations.

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Order up! Tapingo brings mobile food ordering to campus The 8:30 am class might have been a mistake. But to keep from falling asleep in art history John Q. Student simply pulls out his smart phone, opens an app, places an order for the espresso with an extra shot, along with a bagel and cream cheese, and picks it up on his way to class with time to spare.

For more than 60 campuses across the U.S., this scenario is a reality thanks to Tapingo Inc., a provider of online and mobile food service solutions.

Instead of waiting in line for food, a student can open the app on their smart phone – iOS or Android – choose where they want to eat on campus and place an order. The app will then give them a ticket number and let them know how long it will be before the order is ready.

Tapingo enables campuses to outsource mobile and online food ordering on campus. Students can use the university’s declining balance accounts, payment cards or PayPal to make purchases with their mobile app or through a web site, says Ben Anderson, director of campus sales at Tapingo.

Tapingo runs the systems for the university and the merchants with 24/7 support. The company monitors all locations to stay ahead of potential issues.

For example, if the printer is running out of paper or the device is unplugged, Tapingo notifies the venue to prevent any service disruptions, Anderson explains.

But each campus decides how the program is setup. For example, Tapingo has institutions across the country using its system but whether funds from a student account can be used with Tapingo at another campus is up to the student’s institution. Also, some universities don’t offer a declining balance account and Tapingo works with them to create an account or enable use of other payment types.

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Tapingo also provides an off-campus component for its clients that already have a program in place. The system enables students to use their declining balance accounts to make purchases in the community.

For those colleges who have meal plan points instead of dollars Tapingo can offer meal exchanges or meal equivalencies at certain locations, at certain times or with certain limitations. Tapingo can enable those options directly through the application.

Tapingo offers different payment options for universities wanting to use it service. Instead of upfront costs and annual fees, most universities choose to have Tapingo take a small transaction fee on each order to offset launch expenses and ongoing support and marketing costs. If the program does well, the total cost to the campus will increase but the university also will see financial, operational and customer service benefits, Anderson says.

BEYOND DINING AT UNIVERSITY OF SANTA CLARA The University of California at Santa Clara started using the service in January 2012 and has taken it beyond food service, says Nirmal Palliyaguru, director of the ACCESS Card Office at Santa Clara University. All of the school’s dining services are hooked up to Tapingo as well as more than 20 off-campus merchants.

But Santa Clara has also enabled university clubs and student organizations to access Tapingo to accept payments for tickets, t-shirts and other events. The campus ministry, for example, used the service to accept payments for a retreat and reported $15,000 in sales, Palliyaguru says.

Students can hook up their campus card account to Tapingo as well as credit, debit and PayPal accounts.

Santa Clara has seen increases in the total spend per purchase thanks to Tapingo. Instead of having a barista ask if the customer wants an extra shot with the latte, the app asks the question instead.

“With the app I am more likely to buy something with a higher dollar value,” Palliyaguru says.

After a soft launch in January 2012, Santa Clara did a full rollout for the following fall semester, informing incoming freshmen about the app and offering a coupon. Since then, word of mouth has been enough to educate students.

As expected, Santa Clara food service has had to adapt to the new option. Workflows had to change, but Santa Clara had some champions in the department who eased the transition, Palliyaguru says.

Santa Clara pays a fee to Tapingo to use the service. Whether the higher ticket order has offset that fee, Palliyaguru wouldn’t say. “The return we see in student satisfaction is far greater than the fee we pay Tapingo,” he says.

NORTHERN ARIZONA TAKES MEAL PLANS MOBILE Another early adopter of Tapingo was Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.

Tapingo is accepted at 20 on-campus dining options, including Einstein Bagels and some late night fare, as well as some off-campus locations, says TC Eberly, director of campus services and activities at the institution.

The app is popular on campus with 10,000 unique users out of the 19,000-student population, Eberly says. From January to mid-May there were 150,000 orders placed via the app.

As the app’s popularity has grown, so too has the need for students to know when their orders are going to be ready. Northern Arizona decided to use a feature of Tapingo called Active Cashier to keep track of orders and let students know when food will be ready for pickup, Eberly explains.

Active Cashier tracks when an order is entered and fulfilled and automatically provides the customer with the wait time for an order pickup. For example, if a student is leaving class at noon and places an order on his way to the cafeteria, the system will know that it’s a busy time of day and give the student an estimated pickup window based on that data. “We do our best to communicate with the customers and let them know that the order might not be ready as soon as they show up,” Eberly adds.

The university is also fine-tuning how meal plans are accepted via the app at some of its dining partners. The meal plans work on a virtual punch card basis, with students that sign up for the platinum plan receiving more punches per week.

This has caused some complexity when the plans are being consumed outside the campus-run dining halls. For example, the standard meal plan could be used at Einstein Brothers for a coffee and bagel with cream cheese, while the school’s platinum meal plan can be used to get the coffee as well as a breakfast sandwich and fruit cup, Eberly explains.

Northern Arizona has been working with Tapingo to have better integration of these disparate meal plans into the app.

There is also a declining balance account that the university offers, and to add even more to the mix, students can also opt to use a credit or debit account as well.

The university tells students about the app during freshman orientation so they are ready to use it when they arrive on campus in the fall, Eberly says.

Northern Arizona was already looking at running a kind of online ordering

system in house before it found Tapingo, Eberly says “The road blocks and complications for PCI compliance make it difficult for a school to run it in house,” he says.

Eberly hasn’t done a financial analysis of the cost of Tapingo versus what the service brings in, but he says student satisfaction trumps it all. He points out that today’s college freshmen were born in 1996 so they have the expectation of online ordering.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA KEEPS IT ON CAMPUS This fall will mark a full year since the University of Southern California rolled out Tapingo, says Kris Klinger, director at USC Hospitality. The university has 26 retailers on campus signed up to take orders, including California Pizza Kitchen, Starbucks and Coffee Bean.

USC has found that students upsell themselves when using the app, adding an extra side order or item when using the app, Klinger says. Overall locations where Tapingo is enabled have seen greater sales. “We have a Starbucks and a convenience store (that does not accept mobile ordering) and the store sales have dropped while Starbucks has increased,” he explains, adding that people like making purchases with the app.

Working with some of the big brands was a challenge at first, Starbucks and Coffee Bean in particular had to be convinced to accept orders from the app, but it has paid off, Klinger says.

USC students can use the university’s declining balance account to pay for purchases as well as other payment cards.

The school hasn’t done a cost analysis on Tapingo yet, Klinger says. “My gut says it’s pretty close to breaking even,” he explains. “It’s driving transactions, increasing check total and the students expect this so it’s keeping them happy.”

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Universities turn to print cost recovery to save money, cut waste ANDREW HUDSON, ASSOCIATE EDITOR, AVISIAN PUBLICATIONS

Walk into virtually any computer lab or library on a college campus and you’re likely to see rows of print stations processing countless print jobs. Look a little closer and you’ll also find the blue recycling bins overflowing with wasted paper.

Printing is expensive, both in terms of dollars and resources. On a campus it is incessant – a never-ending queue of term papers, exam reviews, class notes and sadly, misprints.

Studies suggest that the average college student produces 320 pounds of paper waste each year. This equates to more than 3,000 pages of wasted printer paper per student, and that figure doesn’t include the non-wasted pages that students print.

“Without any print cost recovery efforts universities are footing the bill for each and every student print job, translating to expenses that can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars,” says Julie Walker, global sales and marketing manager at PaperCut. “By taking some simple measures, university administrators can both limit unnecessary printing and encourage positive student behavior that equates to huge cost savings.”

Technical complexity is a concern as well, as each faculty often has autonomy around IT and devices. “This means that any print cost recovery program must operate with a variety of operating platforms – Windows, Mac, Linux or Novell – and printing devices,” she says.

Likely because of this complexity, print cost recovery traditionally was approached in a lab-by-lab or departmentby-department manner.

Universities have taken a localized approach when implementing print cost recovery, says Dale McIntyre, senior vice president of marketing at Pharos Systems. “Traditionally, it was easier to implement in a single department because that department had its own budget and IT staff,” he says.

But this is now changing. “University administrators are realizing that running disparate solutions on a single campus is not as cost effective,” says McIntyre.

Institutions also want to give students a single print and copy experience across the entire campus. He says there is a new trend to approach these implementations holistically and institution-wide.

THE HIGHER ED CHALLENGE

The typical first step in a print cost recovery effort is observation. A university has to first understand where it’s wasting resources, and to what degree, before it can effectively solve the problem.

Print cost solutions typically provide campuses with an analytical tool that can examine where the print waste is taking place, as well as provide metrics on

Implementing a print cost recovery solution at a university poses challenges that corporate implementations do not. As Walker explains, the logistical complexity of a university – with large distributed sites and multiple faculties – yields unique print requirements.

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HOW IT WORKS

nearly every imaginable aspect of a print job.

“We can differentiate between the type of document it is – PowerPoint, Word, Excel – distinguish based on URL, and assess different costs for each URL,” says Lisa Berta Dzafic, sales advisor at ITC Systems, a campus card provider and PaperCut dealer for the U.S. market. “We can also see what percentage of the page is color versus black and white – a process known as page-level color detection.”

Print control solutions also provide visibility into the volume of users accessing the system, where jobs originate from on campus and where the print ultimately occurs.

“Say, for example, you have a library with five floors and you have print stations on every floor. We can track the most popular areas,” says Dzafic. “Is anyone printing from the fifth floor, or are those workstations sitting idle? How many are printing education-related material and how many are printing from non-university websites. We can also track color ink usage, making it easier to determine how many color-printing stations are needed.”

Print cost recovery not only determines how many pages are being printed, but also user trends throughout the year.

These systems can generate metrics to help a university establish rules and routines to cut costs, determine lab locations and extend or cut print lab hours, for example.

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Best practices Ideas from Pharos • Provide students with real-time feedback during the printing process to make them aware of printing choices that are lower impact.

• Gain student sponsorship at their government level to improve the transition.

• Provide a print cost recovery system that is simple, reliable and delivers a consistent user experience across the devices that matter to students.

Ideas from PaperCut • Understand first who is printing what, when and where • Introduce authenticated printing rather than anonymous printing • Educate students and staff on the impact of printing costs and waste • Implement policies and best practices for print monitoring, preventing accidental duplicates and optimizing print capabilities across devices • Establish department and student quotas on free versus paid print

While these metrics are pivotal to every implementation, they are especially important for those universities with little to no experience with print cost recovery.

“We find that a lot of the universities that are new to the print cost recovery world don’t have a good handle on how much they’re spending on printing, how many reams of paper they’re going through, or how much toner they’re using,” explains Dzafic. “New institutions often set up PaperCut to run in silent mode so we can track and establish how much waste there really is.”

Pharos’ analytics solution, Beacon, is a cloud-based data visualization dashboard for what the company considers the three main vectors in any print solution: devices, users and documents.

“Beacon displays enterprise wide what each disparate department is printing,” explains McIntyre. “This means that print cost recovery doesn’t fall to each department head, rather the university can take a high-level, data-based and analytical approach to controlling waste.”

multiple prints of the same page when only one was actually needed,” says Haber. “Fewer pages printed and wasted represent an immediate cost savings.”

Haber next prescribes charging for print jobs, stressing users must pay to print at any off-campus location so why not on campus. “If a university charges $0.10 per page, they can cover cost of products, supplies and maintenance on all equipment,” he says.

It becomes a bridge toll. “It’s the fairest tax of all because it doesn’t penalize everyone, only those who use it,” Haber says.

But students are likely to view it as anything but fair. “Students always feel they are overtaxed and that everything should be included in tuition, so setting expectations is essential,” Haber explains.

“Stress that the ‘bridge toll’ only affects users, and that it puts funds collected back into the products they use to keep them fresh and functional.”

THE FAIREST TAX?

It’s important that a university have an understanding of how a print cost recovery effort will realistically affect the bottom line. The software alone is far from a magic-bullet solution.

All of the vendors who provided comment for this story said that a university should expect drops in printing of any-

Print waste can typically be dealt with in one of two ways, according to Steve Haber, president of GoPrint Systems.

“First, cost recovery occurs by eliminating wasteful or ‘mistake’ prints which are discarded. These are often misprints or

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REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS

where from 30% to 50% after it is initially deployed.

“Implementing a print cost recovery program is automatically going to reduce the amount of paper coming out of your printers whether you’re charging for each sheet or not,” says ITC’s Dzafic. This is because the solutions end anonymous printing and introduce accountability.

In terms of cost savings, PaperCut’s Walker agrees, saying that a university should expect to see a measured return on investment by saving immediately on paper and toner alone.

Next there is income generation associated with pay-per-print that will both deter unnecessary printing and provide revenue. Additionally, Walker highlights an increased flexibility in printing solutions that enables students to send print jobs to one print queue and release it at any printer across campus.

Institutions can also monitor volumes at each location and can load balance printing across departments and campuses to optimize capital equipment expenses. “To achieve the largest savings, the institution must be conscious of the device utilization and actively manage their distribution and retirement,” says McIntyre.

THE ROLE OF CAMPUS CARD The campus card is a pivotal piece of every college student’s daily life, and the university can leverage this credential as part of a print cost recovery effort as well.

“It should be a requirement for universities to integrate any print cost recovery solution into the existing Active Directory databases and student ID systems,” says PaperCut’s Walker. “Any way to simplify the student experience as they print will be key to adoption of a new system across the campus.”

The campus card system has always been a prime mechanism for the secure release and payment for any student print job related to their role as a student or perhaps their role as a research

assistant on a grant, McIntyre explains.

“Authenticated users and the installation of a release station where students use a card, usually results in significant saving for universities that embrace the system – 30% or more just by installing a secure release station,” says McIntyre.

The campus card is essential to secure release printing, and few would argue that the experience of a card transaction is far superior to typing in your credentials manually. “The student ID simplifies the experience and is essential because it’s tied to that student’s identity,” says McIntyre. “When you go to the secure release print queue, instead of seeing everybody’s print job, you only see yours.”

A MOBILE FUTURE Print cost recovery will have a place on campus so long as its students, faculty and staff require paper to conduct daily business. But the future hinges on the role of mobile devices.

“Today, with wireless, mobile and network printing, universities are asking for increased control for students who are sending jobs to disparate print stations,” says ITC’s Dzafic. Wireless and handheld devices are becoming more prevalent in campus printing, accompanied by a shrinking number of traditional workstations.

Mobile device printing poses problems that don’t exist with workstations, and there are some campuses that are cautious about this area due to security and privacy concerns, says GoPrint’s Haber.

“There are just too many variables involved to imagine that everything created can be sent to a single funnel where it is converted to another format and then printed to perfection,” Haber says. “Students want it and most suppliers provide this service, but it cannot be a complete substitute for driver-based printing.”

But wireless printing remains an option, nonetheless. As Pharos’ McIntyre recalls, Dartmouth made the decision to support wireless printing, and did so

with relative ease. “Dartmouth opted to implement mobile print in the middle of the semester and the middle of the week while students were in class, and the installation took only two hours,” says McIntyre. “All we had to do at the end of two hours was restart print services and the solution was up and running without any glitches.”

Ultimately, for print cost recovery to be successful, it must be accompanied by a change of mindset. In the university space, any additional charge to the student is met with torches and pitchforks,

“For one of our corporate customers, Coca-Cola, we explained that it takes 12 ounces of clean water – not muddy river water, but clean, drinkable water – to produce just one sheet of paper in the manufacturing process,” says McIntyre. “Then we put those posters near the printers in the middle of August when Atlanta was in a drought an under water rations. It hits people right at the heart of things.”

How, then, should a university present this vital information to students?

McIntyre suggests that it’s a matter of incentive.

“Print cost recovery carries a negative

SUCCESSFUL ORGANIZATIONS ELIMINATE NON-ESSENTIAL PRINTING BY HELPING USERS BE MINDFUL OF THE RAMIFICATIONS OF THEIR CHOICE TO PRINT so it is vital that a university educates students on the importance of print cost recovery.

“A university really just wants to police the abusers,” says ITC’s Dzafic.

“Everybody is moving toward a greener lifestyle; teachers are already opting to post their materials on a web portal rather than printing them.”

The first objection we hear is always “my students can’t afford it,” or parents will raise concerns because they already pay so much for tuition, explains Dzafic.

“Nobody realizes how much money is being invested in paper and toner for wasted printing,” she says.

McIntyre is reminded of a common phrase at Pharos: Devices don’t print; people do. “Behavior change is the primary challenge that a technology solution alone can’t solve,” he says. “Successful organizations eliminate non-essential printing or prevent printing abuse by helping users be more mindful of the ramifications of their choice to print.”

It’s a concept that applies to higher education and private corporations alike.

incentive in that I have to pay for every job. It makes me aware of my wallet, but not the bigger picture,” explains McIntyre. “Once you start teaching and engaging hearts as well as minds, behavior management becomes one of positive incentive.”

GOING GREEN, SAVING GREEN Universities face a common challenge when it comes to printing. Managing disparate labs, libraries and print stations as well as the thousands of users that interact with them can be a costly nightmare.

There are solutions available, however, that can provide a comprehensive view of where waste occurs and help to eliminate it. Still there’s far more to implementing an effective cost recovery solution than simply installing software.

Instilling a sense of awareness and accountability in students can go a long way toward a greener, less expensive and more responsible campus print system.

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Should a tiger change its stripe?

The role of mag stripes on the modern college campus The contemporary college campus is a bastion of new technology, serving a student population that thrives on the bleeding edge of technology. This premise holds true for campus cards as well, with the number of universities adopting advanced card technologies growing at a rapid rate.

Still, flip over virtually any student ID and you’ll still find a mag stripe. While it’s exciting to see where card technology is going, sometimes it’s worth it to step back and appreciate the path from whence we came.

ColorID’s corporate marketing manager, Mark Degan offered his insights into the world of the mag stripe, detailing how the old guard of ID cards is still essential on campus today.

PICKING A STRIPE Mag stripes have adorned campus ID cards for decades, and the technology has evolved a bit over time, particularly as it relates to its coercivity levels. Mag

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stripes generally come in two flavors, high coercivity (hico) or low coercivity (loco). Degan insists upon taking the high road.

Coercivity is measured in Oersteds, with a numerical value defining the mag stripe’s coercivity level. “The Oersted Rating refers to the amount of power you need to push through a mag head reader so that you can successfully write data onto the magnetic metal stripe,” explains Degan. “It’s also how much power you need to push through the mag head so that it will rewrite the data that’s already on the stripe.”

As Degan explains, the lower the Oersted rating – as with loco mag stripe cards – the easier it is for the data on that stripe to be wiped clean. “You see it a lot with hotel room keys, for example, where the card will un-encode or demagnetize when coming into contact with a cell phone,” he says.

“We still sell loco mag stripes to a small number of customers, but very few of these customers are in higher education,”

he explains. “Many use loco mag stripes for hotel door keys or one-time card uses like gift cards or visitor passes.”

As Degan explains, loco cards are used because a university has either yet to upgrade their infrastructure, or they haven’t been informed on the benefits of spending a little more money to get a more reliable mag stripe.

A default hico mag stripe typically carries and Oersted rating of 2750, with some manufacturers offering a 4000 Oersted mag stripe. “The gold standard for universities, and the most popular, is the 2750,” says Degan.

DOES IT COME IN RED? Branding and color representation is how a university shows of pride in itself and its identity. A university’s colors can also be reflected in an optional colored mag stripe, though according to Degan, it’s a rare request.

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as long as you’re willing to wait for the material to be made to your specifications,” says Degan. “We only stock navy blue, forest green, silver, red, gold and the standard black.”

Colored mag stripes generally perform exactly the same as the standard black mag stripe, however Degan says that in controlled testing environments, colored mag stripes have shown a slightly higher un-encoding rate and don’t read as consistently on older mag stripe modules.

Rest assured, however, that if you’re in the market for a colored stripe, this error rate is hardly noticeable in practice.

“The average read rate error for black mag stripes is 1% and colored mag stripe is 3%, so both are extremely effective,” says Degan.

TOSSING THE ‘JUNK’ STRIPE Some campus IDs still feature a thin, standalone stripe affectionately referred to as the junk stripe due to its propensity for facilitating junk food purchases at vending machines. Designed specifically to enable off-line transactions, this single track, high-coercivity stripe powered photocopy and vending transactions on campus for more than 30 years. “We still see them around, but the percentages are steadily dropping,” says Degan. “I think they’re dropping because universities are migrating to newer transaction solutions.”

This migration, as Degan explains, moves these transactions online so they no longer need the junk stripe. “A good portion of existing use cases are vending related, but we also still see print/copy functionality and laundry functions are in the mix as well,” he says. “More unique junk stripe implementations are enabling parking or transit transactions or making purchases at a campus cafeteria.”

The bottom line, however, is that there are vendors that are now offering more sophisticated transaction systems. “It’s rendered the junk stripe obsolete,” says Degan.

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MADE IN THE USA There are several ways to get a mag stripe onto a card stock. According to Degan, the most popular and reliable is the “flush” method. This is done by rolling the mag stripe material onto the internal overlay layers and then building your card sheets with artwork sheets and final overlay.

Mag stripes can also be rolled on after the card has been produced. “This method is simple to do, but the mag stripe won’t last as long because it’s not built into the card stock and instead lays on the outside of the card,” says Degan.

Degan suggests that with mag stripes, the old adage holds true; you get what you pay for. It’s for this reason that ColorID works with domestic manufacturers.

“Manufacturing facilities in the states typically produce a higher quality than

“The two-track mag stripe measures 5/16” wide and a three-track mag is ½” wide,” explains Degan. “Using only twotracks may give a university a little more real estate on the back of the card, but the third track can be a valuable addition.”

THE SWIPE One of the primary issues with the mag stripe is durability. Swiping the card through a mag head reader is mandatory every time you want to use the credential.

By the mag stripe’s very nature, you have no choice but to inflict daily wear and tear. “With contactless smart cards, you never touch the card to a reader, so there’s not that same level of abrasion,” says Degan. “It’s hard with mag stripe because you have to swipe; you have to erode the card to make it work.”

By Degan’s estimation, the typical mag

THE COST BETWEEN A TWO- AND THREE-TRACK MAG IS NOMINAL, SO IT’S REALLY UP TO THE UNIVERSITY IF THEY WANT THE ADDED FLEXIBILITY OF A THIRD TRACK OR IF THEY VALUE THE SPACE THEY’D SAVE BY ONLY USING ONLY TWO those cards you can find on the Internet from offshore manufacturers,” says Degan. “If cost is the customer’s only concern, then we can certainly get them a cheaper material, but along with that comes a shorter lifespan and lower overall quality.”

LAYING TRACKS The next consideration for a university deploying a mag stripe credential, is the whether to use two or three tracks within the stripe. The cost between a two-track mag and three-track mag is nominal, at fractions of a cent, so it’s really up to the university if they want the added flexibility of a third track, or if they value the space they’d save on the back by only using only two.

stripe on composite blend card stock should withstand the student’s stay on campus, four to six years. PVC cards, however, could self-destruct before the mag stripe does and often won’t last for a student’s duration on campus, he says.

Durability aside, the mag stripe has survived this long for a reason. It’s effective. “I don’t see the mag stripe going anywhere anytime soon,” says Degan.

“It works; it’s a very good product for a number of applications.”

The latest advancements in campus ID cards, and the transaction systems they interact with, are exciting. And no pun intended, these solutions open the door to new functionality on the college campus. But the mag stripe has long served higher education, and despite its newer competition, will continue to do so for years to come.

Blackboard acquires CardSmith Blackboard acquisition of rival campus card vendor and cloud-system provider, CardSmith, adds an established softwareas-a-service option to Blackboard’s traditional on-premise offering.

In its ten-year existence, CardSmith built a multi-tenant cloud technology alternative to hosted card systems, enabling both universities and K-12 environments to deliver student ID solutions without the need to host software or physical servers on campus.

The acquisition opens the door for Blackboard to pursue a wider range of institutions as well as other closed campus environments like schools, corporate campuses, residential and retirement communities. Smaller entities that traditionally have been unable to afford or maintain hosted solutions may now be within the company’s sweet spot.

“This combination accelerates our progression to a true cloud platform architecture ensuring flexibility, scalability and an increasing rate of innovation for our customers and the students they serve,” says David Marr, senior vice president of Blackboard Transact.

When asked what it could bring to existing Blackboard Transact customers, Marr says, “it demonstrates our commitment to being the technology leader and providing choice to our customers.”

He also adds that it reinforces the Blackboard focus on customer satisfaction. “CardSmith has never lost a client and they have a track record of exceptional customer service,” he adds.

Blackboard will also benefit from key products for card issuance and student tracking that joined the CardSmith portfolio following its 2012 acquisition of Jupiter, Fla.-based Vision Database Systems. VDS founder Emil Bonaduce and his team built the widely used card production software, RapidCard IDMS, as well as a host of student tracking and mobile verification offerings.

CardSmith serves more than 200 institutions and the Blackboard release cites

CardSmith’s reach at more than 2 million cardholders.

“As cloud infrastructures become more mature and deployment more widely adopted, today’s news marks a big step in the evolution of the campus transaction industry,” says Jay Summerall, founder and president of CardSmith. “By joining forces with Blackboard, we are giving an innovative solution more scale to serve more institutions and improve the educational experience.”

For the foreseeable future nothing is expected to change at CardSmith. A Blackboard company spokesperson told CR80News that CardSmith’s management, employees, locations and brand would remain in place and operate as an independent entity for now.

But what can the CardSmith client base expect from the merger?

Marr says there is much to gain. He believes Blackboard is the most innovative provider of hardware and edge devices – particularly as it relates to open standards as well as contactless, native NFC and mobile capabilities.

“CardSmith customers will now have access to leading-edge technology options as well as Blackboard’s integrated security offerings, which facilitate a campus-wide approach to credential and risk management,” he says.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

THE CARDSMITH STORY It’s been nearly a decade since CR80News reported that a couple of campus card industry veterans opted not to join Blackboard when their employer, Student Advantage, sold the assets of its student payment offering known as SACash. Rather than make the move, Jay Summerall and Taran Lent opted to start their own company. That was the birth of CardSmith.

Fast-forward ten years, and the founders of CardSmith will now reportedly join the Blackboard team following their company’s acquisition.

Since its inception, CardSmith was intent on building a campus card offering that broke barriers in the traditional clienthosted, hardware-centric industry. The company pioneered software-as-a-service for card offices and helped take cloud solutions from peculiarity to legitimacy in the higher education vertical.

In the time since, nearly every campus card vendor has worked to migrate their functions to off-premise hosting, multitenant architecture and outsourced service.

CardSmith managed to stay a step ahead in the software-as-a-service arena thanks in part to the company’s original focus on the cloud infrastructure, but also its late arrival to the party, so to speak. Because the company did not have 20-plus years of entrenched system development and client expectations – as was the case with established players like Blackboard, CBORD and Heartland – it was far easier for CardSmith to stay agile and build upon new technology without legacy encumbrances.

Back in 2004 as the company was preparing for launch, founders Summerall and Lent shared with CR80News their goals for CardSmith. “We really believe in the campus card phenomenon,” Summerall said. “Our mission is to make it easier to afford, use and maintain so that the whole range of campuses can reap the benefits card programs bring to a campus.”

“There are literally thousands of campuses that have yet to deploy an effective card program,” added Lent. “Many are too small or lack the resources to take advantage of current industry offerings. We plan to fill this void.”

The company and its founders sought out the smaller underserved campuses and were successful in this aim. Though CardSmith can only claim a handful of top tier institutions, the hundreds of small colleges and universities, as well as K-12 schools, stand as a testament to the company’s original vision.

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Heartland Payment Systems acquires TouchNet for $375 million Purchase increases university presence, curbs regulatory worries Already among the ‘Top of the Charts’ in the payment processing realm, Heartland Payment Systems catapulted to Rock Star status in the campus payment world by announcing its agreement to acquire TouchNet Information Systems, Inc., a Lenexa, Kansas-based integrated commerce solutions provider to higher education institutions.

Rumors of TouchNet’s pursuit of a prospective buyer first surfaced in early 2014, with insider speculation suggesting that non-employee investors were seeking return on investments in the company. The purchase adds a client base of 600 colleges and universities to the Heartland portfolio, and at $375 million, it makes TouchNet the

that enables electronic student billing, refunds, deposits and tuition payment.

The acquisition includes TouchNet’s software, customer base and existing employees, along with the company’s management team. TouchNet’s operations will continue to be based in Lenexa, Kansas, where company founder Dan Toughey says TouchNet’s existing 180 employees will remain.

“Heartland can now offer campus business offices a comprehensive commerce solution that integrates the payment processing capabilities of Heartland into the U.Commerce payment system,” says Michael Lawler, president of the strategic markets group at Heartland Payment Sys-

THE ACQUISITION MAKES HEARTLAND THE LARGEST PROVIDER OF INTEGRATED COMMERCE SOLUTIONS TO THE HIGHER-ED SECTOR largest acquisition in Heartland Payments Systems’ history.

TouchNet serves six million students – nearly one-third of the total higher-education enrollment in the United States.

When combined with Heartland’s existing portfolio of payments, loan servicing and other campus solutions, the acquisition makes Heartland the largest provider of integrated commerce solutions to the higher-education sector, according to the official company release.

Founded in 1989 as a fax and interactive kiosk developer, TouchNet found its niche in the 90s helping campuses handle payments to and from students and other constituents. The company’s flagship products include the U.Commerce framework that centralizes and administers electronic payments; the Payment Gateway transaction management system; and Bill+Payment

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tems. “Heartland Campus Solutions will have relationships with higher-education institutions small and large, which we believe provides entrée to expand all of our Campus Solutions products across this broad portfolio.”

CURBING DEPARTMENT OF ED DOUBTS Toughey was vocal throughout the Department of Education’s Negotiated Rulemaking process, which has left the campus card banking and financial aid refund delivery process in a state of confusion.

Toughey campaigned against the practice of campus-sponsored accounts from banks and third parties, arguing that institutions should not steer students toward a preferred account – otherwise known as the

campus card or campus-endorsed account, sources say.

He argued that the Department of Education should mandate a model that enabled electronic transfer to any account of the student’s choice provided it was not a campus-endorsed account. Not surprisingly, this “ACH anywhere” approach is the model that TouchNet provides for its campus clients.

In recent years, TouchNet has found itself embroiled in patent infringement lawsuits against financial aid distribution company, Higher One. Some suggest this dispute led Toughey to support and even encourage the Department of Education review of campus-sponsored accounts.

While this position made the TouchNet founder unpopular with many vendors and institutions, it also seemingly made his company an attractive safe harbor should the Department of Education’s regulations make campus-sponsored accounts unacceptable or less viable, sources say.

Regardless of ultimate outcomes from the regulatory process, TouchNet revenues and client base will certainly bolster Heartland’s campus business in a big way. But there is an additional synergy that makes the combination unique. Heartland’s core business is to actually process many of the transaction categories that TouchNet helps facilitate on campus. Together the two entities should be more profitable by keeping the sizable processing fees ‘within the family,’ as opposed to paying another entity or processor to handle that piece of the business.

Heartland expects the transaction to add more than $60 million to the company’s 2015 net revenue. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2014, pending regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.

Campus cards cloned on national TV Prox limitations highlighted, wrongfully lumps in contactless Any campus card administrator will tell you that understanding where your card system’s vulnerabilities lie is imperative, and understanding your card technology and its limits, be it mag stripe, bar code, prox or contactless is a crucial component of this understanding.

There are, however, some individuals out there asking the difficult questions and prompting universities to think about their card systems and how they could potentially be compromised. Walt Augustinowicz, founder of Identity Stronghold, has made it his mission to visit campuses across the country to show universities and students alike that their cards might be subject to what he calls a “bump and clone” attack.

UNDER ATTACK The bump and clone attack occurs when a fraudster surreptitiously reads and replicates a student’s 125 kHz proximity card.

From there, the fraudster can often apply the cloned credential to a second, blank card and use it as if it were the original.

THE BUMP AND CLONE ATTACK OCCURS WHEN A FRAUDSTER SURREPTITIOUSLY READS AND REPLICATES A STUDENT’S 125 KHZ PROXIMITY CARD, EVEN THROUGH A BACKPACK 40

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Accompanied by the television show Inside Edition, Augustinowicz traveled to the Northern Arizona University campus to show that their card’s prox technology was susceptible to the bump and clone attack.

“There have been hardware and software tools out there for years that can clone 125 kHz prox cards,” he says. A prox reader and blank cards can be purchased for around $200 and then used in conjunction with a smart phone and antenna array, he adds.

According to Augustinowicz, anyone with the intent could replicate his process.

“We were able to look ahead of time at the university’s web site to see what NAU cards looked like and print a blank card with my picture on it,” says Augustinowicz.

With the permission of a willing student, Augustinowicz cloned an ID card and used it to access buildings and dormitories with the cloned prox credential.

Prox cards have been around for decades so it’s no surprise that the technology isn’t as secure as its successor technology, the contactless smart card.

“Proximity cards became a de facto industry standard during the late 1990s, but as the industry and technology have evolved we have learned that 125kHz prox cards are not as secure as 13.56 MHz contactless smart cards,” explains Jeremy Hyatt, director of global public relations and corporate communications for HID Global.

NAU WEIGHS IN According to Tom Bauer, director of the office of public affairs at Northern Arizona University, the demo was unplanned. Campus administrators only caught wind of the incident after Augustinowicz and the Inside Edition crew had left the campus.

As for the university’s credentials, Bauer explains that a migration is already in full swing. “We are migrating to encrypted cards this fall,” Bauer explains. “Proximity cards are no longer being issued as our primary card technology.”

As for the readers on NAU’s campus, there are only a few prox holdouts, but there are plans to phase those out as well.

“NAU uses multi-class readers throughout campus and manages the accepted credential technologies as appropriate,” says Bauer. “NAU uses prox readers on legacy exterior doors, but will be migrating away from that in the near future so that all doors on campus utilize encrypted card-to-reader communications.”

Despite the impending adoption of encrypted credentials on campus, Bauer does acknowledge the reality of the bumpand-clone attack.

“It’s viable, perhaps, but I don’t think it’s a widespread threat. The situation will change when we introduce encrypted cards,” explains Bauer. “I was disappointed in that Inside Edition used Mr. Augustinowicz as a consultant when he owns a business selling sleeves that prevent card cloning. It appears, on the surface, to be a conflict.”

“Nevertheless, NAU learned an important lesson and has taken steps to prevent this type of threat in the future,” insists Bauer.

CONVENIENCE VS. SECURITY At its core, 125 kHz prox cards are created for the purpose of convenience. They’re great for providing a student quick access to an academic building, residence hall or rec center, but they’re not designed for security like a 13.56 MHz contactless card.

Augustinowicz’s ability to bump and clone a prox card, then, should come as little surprise to those familiar with the technology. Prox was not designed to sup-

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port encryption and advanced security features that make the contactless smart card secure.

As Augustinowicz has seen first hand, however, there are still campus card administrators and campus security officials that lack this vital piece of information.

“It’s amazing the silence that comes after one of our demos,” he says.

Most of the access control readers at NAU are capable of reading both prox and contactless smart cards. This fact further emboldened Augustinowicz’ concern.

“Campus security personnel shouldn’t be paying good money for multi-class readers and then issuing 125 kHz cards,” he says. “Why would you not take advantage of the basic encryption on a 13.56 MHz card?”

It should be said, however, that if not properly implemented, 13.56 MHz credentials carry a similar vulnerability to their prox counterparts. Every contactless card features a free-read card serial number.

This number is not encrypted, can be read by any reader and was never intended for use as a secure identifier. Rather it is used to initiate security functions such as mutual authentication.

Still some poorly implemented contactless systems have utilized this unencrypted serial number as the identification number.

The possibility exists, then, that these cards could be susceptible. Obviously, to not leverage the encryption capabilities of a contactless card would be a waste of security features and money, as this is what sets contactless technology apart from prox.

PREVENTING ATTACK For prox users, Augustinowicz’s prescription is to issue a protective shield with every proximity card. A shielded protective sleeve – like that manufactured by Identity Stronghold – essentially turns the card off keeping hackers from sniffing credential data.

One of Identity Stronghold’s offerings, the BloxProx sleeve, has both a shielding

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mechanism and a jamming mechanism that interferes with the bump and clone process. Instead of simply blocking the attack, the sleeve also spits out a false number when someone tries to sniff the card. It’s a solution that Augustinowicz says works for both 125 kHz prox and 13.56 MHz contactless cards alike.

Turning a contactless card off when not in use can be beneficial if you are protecting personal information like that stored on a bankcard. But many would argue that shielded card sleeves only safeguard a physical location if every student has one, uses it, and keeps their credential on their person at all times.

“The technology that the vendor has chosen to exploit in the demo is 30 years old and is simply not comparable to the highly secure credentials available today,” says Jeff Staples, vice president of marketing development at Blackboard Transact.

“The answer to this challenge is not to deploy a sleeve that costs $7.98 each, but rather involves refreshing the card technology and taking advantage of credentials with strong encryption.”

“If a fraudster wants to compromise a card in this scenario they can simply remove it from the shield, meaning this product only guards against a passerby,” says Staples. “The institution can only guard against a determined bad actor by utilizing cards with advanced encryption.”

Staples suggests that secure contactless smart card credentials are particularly wellsuited for this application and are priced between 50% and 75% less per card than a sleeve.

“Leveraging the media, while fraudulently creating and using a student ID card is a curious way of selling your product,” he says.

“Our clients have been going through this refresh process for several years now and Blackboard has shipped more than two million secure credentials since 2010,” he says. “These schools are securing their program from the inside-out, rather than bowing to the questionable tactics of a ven-

dor whose product costs more than twice as much and only secures cards where it would be used 100% of the time.”

NOTHING BUT THE BEST Every institution should keep best practices in mind when implementing a secure card system. Staples says an institution should adopt a high security credential and follow widely accepted rules of issuance and acceptance including: Issuing ISO-standard secure credentials that support a minimum 112 bit encryption, either triple-DES or AES Utilizing the secure areas on the card to store credentials used for any sensitive transactions Using best practices for contactless security, including mutual authentication, diversified keys and encrypted data payload.

HID’s Hyatt concurs, stating that “regardless of which card technology is used, it is important to keep in mind that access control cards and readers are only one aspect of a facility security system, and that the most effective security is achieved by a layered approach.”

The day may never come when a single, magic-bullet solution is deployed. However this layered approach, when implemented properly, can provide the security needed to safeguard not only physical locations on campus, but the students that use them as well.

Migrating card technology may seem an insurmountable task, but it’s a crossroads at which many – if not all – universities arrive in time. Moreover, if your campus relies on older, susceptible technology, card migration may be the only way to completely eliminate the cloning risk.

The lesson that can be learned from the bump and clone demonstrations is an important one nonetheless. It is essential to understand your card technology so that neither your card office nor university administration are blindsided should its limitations be exploited.

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Attendance evolved Baltimore public schools taking roll with contactless IDs Attendance is a primary, daily function at virtually every elementary, middle and high school across the country. For large schools and districts, logging and reporting student attendance can be an incessant challenge. In Baltimore, a new system is redefining attendance with the student ID card, paving the way for improved campus safety and efficiency.

To aid in this challenge, ScholarChip – a smart card ID

provider for the K-12 market and payment gateway and electronic signature provider for Higher Education – has developed a centralized school safety system that leverages a one-card solution.

THE CHARM CITY When Baltimore County Public Schools wanted to better unify school safety and operational services, they turned to ScholarChip, a provider of

card-based and transaction solutions for K-12 and higher education markets.

Using a small army of fixed and mobile attendance readers, real-time attendance is recorded at entrances to buildings and in classrooms. Students use newly issued contactless ID cards to “tap” into buildings, classrooms and buses.

The initial phase of the Baltimore project includes integration between ScholarChip’s data center and the Baltimore County Public School District’s student information and security door access systems.

The company is providing the photo IDs containing a MIFARE contactless chip to the district’s 126,000 students and staff members.

“The IDs will serve as a single credential for multiple applications, from access control to identification and library services, as well as attendance monitoring and bus attendance to and from schools,” says Bob Abbatecola, director of creative services at ScholarChip.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE CHARM Baltimore is the nation’s 23rd largest school district, with 173 buildings and 7,000 classrooms. The implementation will take place in stages, says Abbatecola, but the goal is for each of the 7,000 classrooms to be outfitted with a door reader or be serviced by a portable attendance kiosk.

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As an added challenge, the new system had to support the district’s legacy proximity door access system. This required dual technology cards for staff, including traditional proximity technology to support legacy access points as well as contactless for use in new locations.

To get cards in the hands of both staff and students by the start of this school year required an aggressive issuance strategy. Using specially equipped printers from Evolis, ScholarChip handled the bulk of the initial card production at its offices.

“We have already delivered 19,000 full-color staff IDs and we are working to deliver 103,000 student IDs,” says Abbatecola. “Once issued, the contactless IDs are ready to capture attendance in real time via the kiosks, classroom readers or NFC-enabled tablets.”

PRINTING WITH EVOLIS Beyond this initial issuance, printing new MIFARE cards across the many disparate campuses will fall to district staff.

Every school will be provided with an Evolis card printer to support onsite, ongoing issuance.

For the Baltimore project, Evolis provided more than 200 of its Primacy printers, with at least one unit deployed at each of the 169 schools. The Primacy was chosen for its speed and ease of use. “The Primacy can print up to 225

cards per hour, with the card feeder and output tray holding up to 100 cards each. Moreover, these trays are conveniently located at the front of the unit for easy access,” says Jean-Charles Pichon, sales and project manager at Evolis.

Evolis’ High Trust ribbons make life easier for school employees, he explains, as the ribbons are extremely easy to install and feature automatic recognition to eliminate driver adjustment.

“The printers used in Baltimore have been customized according to ScholarChip’s requirements,” says Pichon.

The project required a dualfrequency encoder – capable of personalizing both prox and contactless – to be built into the Primacy printers.

“To ease and speed up the issuance process, a dual-frequency RFID encoder is integrated so that a fully encoded and printed card is issued in a single pass, avoiding any potential mismatched information,” he says.

“In a very short time Evolis was able to integrate the new encoder in the Primacy line,” says Pichon. “The challenge included the selection of the encoders, prototyping, piloting and final delivery of more than 200 units – over a very short time frame.”

PORTABLE KIOSKS The kiosks that await students at school entrances, and in some cases the doors to their classrooms, are a key component of the system. With rubber wheels and steel construction, the mobile units are designed for mobile attendance func-

Key ScholarChip implementations: • Baltimore County Public Schools Maryland: The nation’s 23rd largest school system • School District of Philadelphia: The eight largest school district in the nation • Fairfax County School District Virginia: The nation’s 11th largest school system • Kingsborough Community College (New York City): Supports more than 39,000 students and staff • Richland County School District One: South Carolina’s fifth largest school district.

tions across campus in cafeterias, assembly halls and sporting events.

Each kiosk features two smart card readers to expedite entry and are capable of processing up to 40 students per minute. Both wired and wireless network access is supported to provide real-time identification and logging.

The kiosks feature a standard sized computer monitor that can display a custom message for each student. “Kiosks will be attended by a school administrator to ensure that students are informed of any alarms, such as having to visit the principal’s office,” says Abbatecola. “We can even send a ‘Happy Birthday’ message.”

The kiosks can also be outfitted with a printer to produce late passes, or in the case of a forgotten ID, a temporary student credential. They can also process visitor management requests, read state-issued driver licenses and print visitor badges.

The number of kiosks needed per campus will depend on the population, but a typical school will require anywhere from one to six, says Abbatecola.

WHEELS ON THE BUS While processing and monitoring student attendance and engagement on campus remains a cornerstone concern for school administrators, there is an oft-overlooked aspect of attendance that occurs everyday before a student even sets foot on campus: the bus.

Baltimore County Public Schools expressed interest in a solution to log student attendance on buses. Though it won’t be supported at the outset, bus attendance tops the to-do list.

“Bus attendance represents a large step towards ensuring accountability for the whereabouts of all students,” says Abbatecola. “The bus attendance app color codes a student’s presence or absence on the bus and issues alerts when exceptions to those rules are found.”

At the end of a bus route, students that have not tapped a bus reader to indicate that they are getting off the vehicle are logged in the system automatically. Reports then provide, in nearly real time, a historical log of bus attendance, as well as the last location at which a student tapped their smart ID.

Hardware options for the buses are under consideration now. “Some schools have existing readers built into their buses, and we can interact with that. We can also implement readers from vendors that we have worked with in the past,” says Abbatecola. “The most cost-effective way would be to install NFC-enabled tablets on the dashboard, as they can interact with the MIFARE cards.

It’s up to the school officials as to how they want to proceed.”

TAKING ROLL Taking attendance isn’t just a mandatory chore; it’s a vital action that can ensure both the safety and participation of students on campus.

The initiative in Baltimore, and those in other public school districts across the country, is using ScholarChip’s one-card solution to monitor students as they travel from home, to bus, to campus and back again.

It’s a valuable tool that can ease the workload for outnumbered school administrators, provide added peace of mind for parents, and is paving the way for the future of attendance.

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Forecasting a place for Bluetooth on campus NFC implementations on campus have been anything but perfect. Between the fractured industry adoption, the relatively few university-specific pilots and the ongoing rejection by Apple, some question if NFC can make the grade.

Still many argue that there is merit in what NFC could do for a college campus.

But in light of its slow launch, are there other options?

Enter Bluetooth Low Energy. Also known as Bluetooth Smart, or BLE for short, this emerging technology is quickly positioning itself as a direct comparison, if not outright competitor with NFC. “Physical access control has been a stale industry and this is one of the more exciting things to come around,” says John Fenske, vice president of product marketing for physical access control at HID Global.

From a physical access control and identity standpoint, Bluetooth Low Energy represents a viable, campus-ready solution because it’s already in virtually every recent model handset and computer. In fact, the specification has been included on iPhones and Android handsets dating back to 2012.

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Herein lies the first advantage that Bluetooth Low Energy has over NFC. It already resides in a majority of smart phones so an overwhelming number of students could use it. BLE could make a smooth transition to campus.

As an added bonus for universities, it doesn’t carry the same complexity that has long mired the NFC ecosystem when it comes to placing credentials on handsets.

Campus officials don’t have to worry about getting agreements in place with the mobile operators to gain access to the secure element. BLE enables credentials to be easily placed in handsets.

“The barriers to using NFC have been high,” explains Fenske. “If you’re looking at using a phone with NFC and you want to put information on the secure element, you have to go through the mobile operator and they charge for that access.”

But BLE does pose a challenge. NFC can typically be read from less than an inch away, while Bluetooth can transmit at a distance of 10 to 15 feet. This longer read range could be problematic when a student tries to, for example, access their dorm room.

There’s a thin line between constraint and opportunity, however, as HID is currently working on this issue with a gesturebased activation system.

So when the student arrives at the door to their room, well within the 10-15 foot Bluetooth radius, they simply rotate their phone in a specified manner – like turning a doorknob – to activate the lock. This solution simply leverages the device’s built-in accelerometer, which normally controls screen orientation, as an added authenticator.

The traditional concern with Bluetooth was the protocol’s supposed lack of security, but the new specifications for BLE include 128-bit encryption. The ability to lock down transmitted data in this way could make BLE an ideal fit for the myriad of transactions that students conduct each day, from the line at the dining hall, to perimeter door access at the rec center, to making a purchase at the campus coffee shop.

So while NFC struggles, Bluetooth Low Energy may be poised to jump to the head of the class.