Milestone Systems, the IP video management software firm, has announced XProtect Central version 3.6. The Danish firm says that large security installations can minimize risks and optimise operations using clickable graphical overviews and customisable alarms with visual verification on the status of all connections and hardware. XProtect Central is especially suitable it is claimed for multiple sites or buildings.
Visually verify
Installations with a variety of servers, cameras and hardware must run properly to ensure top security: if a device fails to record or display video, the outcome can be devastating. Milestone XProtect Central is a tool for managing the demands of such critical operations to help ensure maximum up-time, total overview, and fast response. It monitors the operational status and event-triggered alarms of Milestone XProtect Corporate or XProtect Enterprise servers, video surveillance cameras, and integrated devices like access control units.
Security operators get graphical overviews of alarms and technical problem alerts with visual verification to resolve issues. Most importantly, the firm adds, they are able to create an audit trail of the events.
Map overviews
Multi-level maps let users navigate to and identify an incident location and the system elements involved: alarms are shown at the highest level map, like a city site, and operators can click down to sub-level maps of buildings, rooms, gates, etc. Output signals, as well as global and user defined events can be placed on a map and activated via a context menu.
Alarm management
An alarm list displays a filtered overview of all problems for clicking to an incident. A continuous beep feature has been added, where the client application can attract attention if it has been minimized. When continuous beep has been chosen in the system setup, the application will beep every five seconds while new priority-1 alarms remain unhandled.
Users can define alarm priorities, pre-define time profiles, acknowledge or reassign alarms. Enable and disable alarms with controlled user commands or by hardware input signals. For example, this can be used to enable a motion detected alarm when the last person leaves a building. Alarms with related cameras will now run through all of them to grab the relevant images. This is useful for alarms triggered by an input signal with a preview image from a camera, and can also be used for two cameras watching each other: if one fails, the other provides a preview image of what happened with the first one.
Integration with third-party systems
XProtect Central has plug-in support for third-party systems like access control or other devices. Operators can both monitor and control these from the XProtect Central interface (close or open gates, doors, turn off smoke detectors), in addition to monitoring and verifying their status and alarms.
“Banks are finding XProtect Central especially useful for powerful overview of their branch locations. When integrated with XProtect Transact to associate ATM transactions with video surveillance, they get an integrated solution for alerts and analysis of defined exception events, also triggering alarms. The new color coding and continuous beep function for priority 1 alarms ensure that personnel can respond fast with the right interventions,” says Christian Bohn, Head of Product Management at Milestone Systems. “Exception tools can even look for behavior across multiple ATMs, like persons feeding the same cards many times, etc. Analytics may also be integrated to analyse human and vehicle traffic around ATMs or other areas."
