Advanced Situation Manager is an extension of the Global Lock and Global Unlock features that are available. You can not only use the Situation Manager for unlocking and locking doors but you can create different system behavior for different types of threat levels.
The feature allows you to configure the system to behave in a certain way in the event of certain emergency situations. For example, under a heightened level of security you may wish for certain doors in the facility to be set to Card + PIN mode, such as store cupboards, server rooms or other rooms that contain high-value assets.
Another example of when the feature could be used is in an emergency situation in a hospital. During a facility lockdown you may wish to prevent entry or egress through perimeter doors, but to allow cardholder access to staff at certain interior doors, such as between wards.
Note: This feature is only supported on PXL, NXT Mercury Powered and Mercury controller/hardware types. It is NOT supported with the standard NXT hardware.
Verify Your License has the Feature Enabled
Advanced Situation Manager is a licensed feature, so it must enabled on your license. To check if the feature is enabled:
Look for Enable Advanced Situation Manager and verify it is set to True.
Enable the Feature
Enable Global Macro - This must be enabled if you want to incorporate Situation Manager into Global Linkage actions.
Click the save icon when you have enabled the feature.
You now have to configure the various threat levels for the system, you can define up to five in total. These threat levels determine how readers on the system behave during certain situations. For example, a low threat level might require certain doors to be completely unlocked, a medium threat level certain doors might require a card and PIN for entry and during a high threat level certain doors on the system might be put into Lockdown mode (where cardholders will not be able to gain access and the RTE/Exit button will also be disabled).
Situation Manager can be applied to all doors on the system or on just one door, it's completely flexible.
Note: Situation Manager is NOT supported with the standard NXT hardware.
You will see additional icons for the Situation Manager, these are the default icons that represent each of the enabled threat levels.
Note: You can easily replace these icons should you wish to (ideal dimensions are approx. 55 x 55 pixels.
As you can see the default icons are colored squares to represent each of the 5 threat levels (1 = green, 2 = blue, 3 = yellow, 4 = amber and 5 is red). This section explains how you can replace or add text to these icons.
The next section is probably going to be quite time consuming as it requires
you to define how certain readers on the system will behave during the different
threat levels. For example, an exterior door may need to be set to
Lockout or Lockdown when the system is in Emergency Lockdown or High
Threat level situations. Any readers that have not been configured for Situation
Manager will continue to operate as per the settings within the controller
properties.
Usually Situation Manager is activated via the icons that are added to the Home ribbon bar.
From the Ribbon Bar
Using Global Linkage
If you have Global Linkage enabled on your system you can easily set up a Global Linkage Macro that will activate a threat level.
You then create a trigger that will action the macro.
A Global Linkage trigger could be:
Note: Global Linkage commands generate from the PC and as a result, controllers will not receive any commands if they are offline.
When you configure your Situation Manager Levels there is an 'Ignore Override' setting which by default is set to No. That means you will be able
to override the Situation Manager such as via a remote command from the software (right-clicking the reader and changing the reader mode).
If you set this option to Yes you will then not be able to override Situation Manager.