Helping college students who are on their own for the very first time can be a rewarding experience for employees of a bank’s on-campus branch. Students may never have had a bank account before and it may be their first experience with a payment card as well. True, they could deal with an online bank or work with their bank back home or across town, but many find there is no substitute for sitting across the desk from a real live human being at a brick and mortar bank on campus. 

For the second time in less than a year, access control and card provider IDenticard (and sister company IDenticam) has new ownership. Last year, the Pennsylvania company was acquired by GE and today it was announced that Brady Corp. is the new owner. Brady’s other personal identification companies include TEMPbadge, Stopware and J.A.M. Plastics in the U.S., and BIGBadge in the U.K and France. 

USA Today, aided by a Dallas, Texas-based smart card company, is getting its newspapers into the hands of college students using the college’s own campus card program. The QI controller and USA Today machines are currently in use on at least 70 campuses. 

A new version of CBORD’s campus ID solution is specifically designed to meet the needs of small- to mid-size corporations and campuses. Called OdysseyOne™, the new program runs on lower cost desktop hardware under the Windows XP Pro OS. 

Counterfeit stickers adhered to University of Hawaii campus cards could jeopardize the University’s relationship with the city transit agency. With advancing ID card technology, many if not most campuses have totally eliminated the use of stickers as a form of authentication for service. The lesson here … if you haven’t you should, or at least you should be prepared for some level of fraud. 

Five buildings and 148 doors at the Ohio campus on Wright Patterson AFB are now secured via a FIPS 201 compliant physical access control system. The solution, integrated by SMARTnet Inc., reads current Common Access Cards and will read next generation contactless cards. 

by Tom Bell, Vice President, Commerce Industry Relations, Blackboard

At a recent seminar, campus executives were asked how they planned their card system and if their plan was strategic. All referred to the planning as “detailed;” and said it involved partner research, equipment evaluation, software testing and a variety of other important steps. As much as they wanted it to be, however, none considered it strategic, let alone ongoing.