June 2008 — News
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Do-It-Yourself IP Video Surveillance in Arkansas
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When the need arose, Arnol Shaw, IT director for Fort Smith Public Schools in Arkansas, knew exactly who should tackle the work of implementing an IP video surveillance program in the district: his own IT team. After all, his two wiring technicians had worked in the buildings for years, so they knew the construction compositions and layouts. And his two network administrators were both familiar with what the network could support. "We were prejudiced," he said. "We really wanted IP-based technology."
 Arnol Shaw, Fort Smith Public Schools |
That experience is paying off. A recent installation of 14 cameras in one secondary school took only about a week. The building was already networked--as are all the schools in the district--and the technicians "knew where to run the new wires, knew where to put the surface mounts," Arnol said. "It's not like a vendor coming in and having to drill a bunch of holes."
Video cameras of the analog variety first started appearing in Fort Smith schools four to five years ago, just a few years after the district had installed a fiber cable backbone to run its wide area network. Those early video devices were managed by the maintenance department, installed by a myriad of integrators and came in many different brands. At that point, IP systems were considerably pricier than analog, so the schools went for immediate cost savings over long-term return-on-investment and extended functionality.
But in the intervening years, costs for the equipment have come down. When Shaw's team did an evaluation of potential IP-based options, they discarded some of the big-name vendors in the education space and chose equipment and Windows-based software from Wren Solutions after visiting Bentonville High School, which deployed 190 of the company's cameras in 2007.
As Shaw recalled, "The solution they were using looked as good as anything I'd seen. It was easy to use. The solution for conversion of analog cameras was good. Training was good."
