Alfa-college

The Alfa-college is a Christian regional training center (ROC) for the Northern and Eastern Netherlands, which offers MBO courses, educational pathways and company training. With approximately 2000 employees, they train around 15,000 young people and adults for today’s and tomorrow’s society. The Alfa College’s courses and educational programs can be found at six different locations in Groningen, Hoogeveen, Hardenberg and Assen.

The Alfa College uses a smart card for access, lockers, printing and a number of other facilities. For the management and production of this smart card, the Alfa College has placed its trust in ScreenCheck, which offers a good card management solution with CardsOnline.

CardsOnline connects the facility systems to the smart card

The Alfa-college smart card needs to be produced and managed, as well as connected to the facility systems. ScreenCheck offers CardsOnline as an Azure SaaS solution for managing, producing, encoding and connecting the smart card. CardsOnline provides efficient and secure online access to the various authorized users of the Alfa-college for managing the cards.

Different facility systems are in use at the six locations of the Alfa college with several buildings. ScreenCheck connects the source systems for the employees (YouForce) and students (Eduarte) to CardsOnline for the correct card data. In addition, the student and employee cards are connected via CardsOnline to the access control system of Salto, the locker system Releezme, the printing system Follow me and Netpay for the facilities of the employees.

Producing and encoding the cards

Alfa-college uses anonymous cards. The offset printing and afterwards printing and encoding of the cards with an external card number is done by ScreenCheck. Three Units have been created in CardsOnline to manage card data and produce the cards. The cards printed from the Unit “Employees” are provided to the employee by Alfa College. There is no printing directly from the “Student” Unit. The anonymous cards printed from the “SC Production” Unit are linked by Alfa-College manually, via a keywedge reader that reads the card serial number, to the correct card holder in the student or staff unit.

Screencheck uses the Evolis Quantum II card printer to print and encode the smart cards. The Card Print Manager (CPM) installation at ScreenCheck is the interface between CardsOnline and this card printer. The ScreenCheck employee manages, prints, encodes and validates the cards with the help of the CPM. CPM offers various print management options, such as automatic printing.

CardsOnline Service Portal

The CardsOnline Service Portal was set up for the Alfa-college with SSO (Single Sign On). Cardholders can log in to the Service Portal with their existing login details and block a lost card.