The customer had an old system comprising of card printing software & P420C's.

The printers had reached the end of their reliable working life, but the software was very unreliable and complicated to use. It also required the end user to manually run up to 5 routines daily to export data from a human resources database into another application and then into the old badge print software. Further routines were required to export data again for import into the access control application. This setup introduced the risk of error and caused reliability issues. Their objective was to update to software which could use a single database on their SQL server running automatic routines to handle the import and export of data. A simple user interface was also essential.

DED is the official distributor of ExchangeIt products in the UK and contacted ExchangeIt about this project. "The situation of this customer of DED was a perfect fit for CardExchange in combination with the Zebra card printers,"said Marcel Oosterhof General Manager ExchangeIt. "We build External Functions that communicate with an external DLL from the payment supplier. We build a cardholder database based on MS SQL Server and we wrote a synchronization routine that imports information from their leading Human Resource application into the CardExchange database. By just selecting the right card layout, selecting the name of the employee and pushing the print button, CardExchange moves the MIFARE 1K card to the DigiOn24 reader, which we use in combination with the Zebra printers, reads the Chip Serial Number and writes it back to the database, and then it programs the MIFARE® card with the payment application and information for the access control system."

"To get this project running we worked very closely with the development department of ExchangeIt, " says Elliot Davis Sales Manager of DED. "Together with the technical people from DED and technical people from ExchangeIt we did the whole implementation on location in 2 days on two separate locations. Because of the good relationship between DED and ExchangeIt we were able to prepare almost everything in front and that makes the implementation of the whole system manageable."