Our company needs a device for an interior door entrance that provides the following;
RFID badge access to employees (or PIN in case they forget badge)
Audio communication
Video is a nice to have
Call button programmed to ring defined group
Dial pad to dial extensions
Door release via button on phone
Because I don’t know much about wiring into our building access control I went to the company we use for access control. They recommended the Axis devices since they’ve used them before. In particular the AXIS A8207-VE. It should do everything we want.
I started looking through Endpoint Manager (EPM) and didn’t see any Axis devices listed. Was a bit surprised since I think Axis is a pretty major company, at least in security. This made me wonder if I’ll have any issues connecting it to FreePBX and how difficult it might be.
Alternatively it looks like the only EPM devices like what I’m looking for are cyberdata and a grandstream device? Am I missing something?
The cyberdata look more for exterior entrances. Not very clean or pleasant to look at. And I’m not really seeing any option that meet all the requirements I listed above. The grandstream models look like they might work, but I must admit I’ve never been the biggest fan on their equipment (plus I’ll have to try to convince the access control vendor that it’s easily connected into our system).
EPM is vendor driven - if the vendor wants their product in EPM, they will contact Sangoma to get it included.
From their documentation:
VoIP Support for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for integration with Voice over IP (VoIP) systems, peer to peer or integrated with SIP/PBX Tested with various SIP software such as Cisco, Bria and Grandstream Tested with various PBX softwares such as Cisco, Avaya and Asterisk Phone book, parallel call forking, sequential call forking, call extension dialing.
I don’t know if that means they have gotten it working with FreePBX/Asterisk or not, but it’s pretty clear from their other documentation that you need a Windows workstation running their proprietary control software to (at least) configure it. You’ll also need some other proprietary stuff from them for the other features. From the User Manual, it looks like you’re going to end up creating some custom contexts to handle things like DTMF interfacing to the opener. Also, it looks like the lock needs a directory of contacts with direct SIP addresses for the phone to “phone home”. The docs are a little confusing in that part and they don’t have a lot of examples.
Having said that, I don’t think it should be a big deal to get it working.
Grandstream and fanvil make SIP doorphones with RFID. I don’t work for them or are related to them in any ways, just stating the ones I know of and have used.