@PCSchool 1/13

GateKeeper

Table of Contents

Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 2

Using the GateKeeper .................................................................................................................. 3

Students/Boarders and Staff ........................................................................................................ 3 1. Identify Yourself ................................................................................................................... 3 2. Arriving or Departing ............................................................................................................ 3 3. Select Reason ...................................................................................................................... 3 4. Finalisation ........................................................................................................................... 3

Visitors ......................................................................................................................................... 4 1. Register Entry or Exit ........................................................................................................... 4 2. Name and Purpose .............................................................................................................. 4 3. Identification ......................................................................................................................... 4 4. Additional Questions ............................................................................................................ 4

Reasons - Setup ............................................................................................................................ 5

Student & Boarder Reasons ........................................................................................................ 7 Staff ............................................................................................................................................. 8

Spider Sign-In/Sign-Out ........................................................................................................... 9 Vistors ......................................................................................................................................... 9

Approval Stations Setup .............................................................................................................. 9

Spider Settings ........................................................................................................................... 10

GateKeeper Functional Setup .................................................................................................... 10 GateKeeper Screen Setup ......................................................................................................... 11

Software and Hardware Requirements ...................................................................................... 13

@PCSchool 2/13

Introduction

GateKeeper is PCSchool’s arrivals and departures system, designed for use by students/boarders, staff, and visitors to the school. It allows those persons entering or leaving the school to quickly select from a series of “reasons” customised by the school, in order to keep track of those on or off of the school grounds.

For students, GateKeeper uses the lates/early tab and operates separately to attendance roll-marking and absences, although it can be integrated to some degree. The “reasons” that students can select can be constrained by year-level and may or may not require approval from a staff member before it is recorded.

For boarding students, GateKeeper can keep track of those that should or shouldn’t be expected in the dormitory. This can be reported on quite easily.

Staff can use both GateKeeper and the Sign-In/Sign-Out control through the Spider website to register their arrivals and departures. These records can also store whether they are working while off of school grounds, which can be summarised in reports.

"Reasons” provide a quick-list of options that allows Students, Boarders and Staff to select the common or accepted reasons for arriving or departing. In the case of Visitors, the options are much more open ended, and the visitor is unlikely to be able to quickly identify themselves.

Reasons can require approval before being submitted, for example a student shouldn’t be allowed to say they left for or arrived from a doctors appointment without verification. In order to authorise a reason that requires approval, a staff member in the area would need to approve the Reason, which is done using “GateKeeper Admin.” In a generic situation, a receptionist would have this installed on their computer, and they would get pop-up notifications to approve or deny when necessary. When a reason is used that requires approval, it submits a request for approval to all those GateKeeper Admin computers within the “Approval Station” group, so any of multiple people may authorise or decline the reason.

@PCSchool 3/13

Using the GateKeeper Although the user experience will change depending on the hardware and options available, the following should give you an initial idea of using the GateKeeper. Most users from within the school will follow a very similar process, however visitors to the school have a moderately different set of options that are more open-ended. The following will cover Students/Boarders and Staff, then Visitors will be covered in the following section.

Students/Boarders and Staff

The basic process more or less involves four main steps.

1. Identifying yourself either by ID card and scanner (e.g. barcode), or selecting yourself through a series of options.

2. Choose whether to record yourself arriving or departing.

3. Choose a reason from the relevant options (defined by the school).

4. Finalisation: Have your reason confirmed by a staff member (if applicable), pick up a slip (if applicable), and carry on your way.

1. Identify Yourself

Firstly, users select what type of user they are going to be signing in or out as: “Student,” “Boarder,” “Staff,” or “Visitor.” This applies to anyone using GateKeeper.

Once the user has selected what type of user they are, they may get the option to swipe a barcode (dependant on configuration settings). If they swipe a barcode or similar option, they immediately progress to the next option (Arriving or Departing).

If the user has lost their card for whatever reason, there is a button that allows users to select themselves from a list. This can be skipped if the school doesn’t use scanners. This button gives users a list of options to find a smaller list of names to select (rather than all students, or all staff). For staff, the option is based on the first letter of either their surname, given name, or name for reports. For students this consist of their year level, followed by another option to pick their home class, home teacher, or house (dependant upon configuration).

2. Arriving or Departing

This option is very simple – one button gives you options that are relevant to signing in (meaning you are coming onto school grounds), while the other button gives you options for signing out (off school grounds). The text used to describe these are customisable per user type: for example, Staff and Boarders might have “Signing In” while Students might have “Late Arrival”.

3. Select Reason

The reasons available will be different depending on the user type. For example Staff might be able to sign-out for Lunch while that would be unavailable to Students/Boarders. Amongst students, the reasons might also be restricted based on Year Level, such as allowing senior-year students to sign-out when they have a study period at the end of the day.

4. Finalisation

Dependant upon the settings, different users may be offered the option to record a “Tentative Time Back” meaning record the time they expect to return to the GateKeeper.

For some reasons, a confirmation may be needed (depending on settings). This confirmation ensures that a relevant person authorises the reason given, before it is saved into the database. This confirmation step doesn’t apply to staff, and may only apply to some reasons for students. For example you might have a reason available to students such as “No Reason,” to be used when they don’t have an acceptable excuse, which they should be able to willingly select without any additional intervention.

@PCSchool 4/13

Once the reason is confirmed, a slip may also be printed depending on whether the reason selected requires it. Using the same example, it would likely be a waste to print a slip that simply said “No Reason.”

Visitors

Visitors to the school are required to give answers to open ended questions to both identify them and describe the purpose for their visit.

1. Register Entry or Exit

The first option Visitors get is selecting whether they are arriving or departing. The “Register Entry” option allows the visitor to enter their details as necessary, while the “Exit” closes their existing record. To Exit, visitors can either swipe the barcode on their visitor slip (supplied by registering earlier) or enter the code manually.

The next version of GateKeeper will also allow users to re-enter using an old visitor slip as a shortcut. This can be enabled or disabled but if enabled creates a new record using some details from the previous registration.

2. Name and Purpose

Once a visitor has selected to register, they are required to enter a name and a purpose for their visit. In the next release of GateKeeper, you will also have the ability to set up a series of quick-options for visitors such as “Contractor,” although visitors can still enter their own purpose.

3. Identification

Once the visitor has entered their name and the purpose of their visit, they need to provide identification. They can either take a photograph of themselves via the GateKeeper’s webcam if applicable, or enter details defined by the school such as their driver’s licence number.

4. Additional Questions

Lastly, GateKeeper may ask visitors to answer up to three questions also defined by the school. These questions may simply ask for additional information like where they parked their car (which can also remind them). If these questions are cleared (saved as blank) in the configuration settings, then this entire step is removed.

A further step may ask for a “Tentative Time Back” (skipable) meaning what time the user expects to return to the GateKeeper to exit the school.

A visitor slip will be printed at this point.

@PCSchool 5/13

Reasons - Setup

The GateKeeper allows those arriving or departing the option to select quick-reference reasons relating to their arrival/departure. These reasons are completely customisable, and are recorded upon the person arriving or departing. The arrivals and departure records are stored in the existing Late/Early tab for Students and the Staff Arriv/Depart tab.

Each reason can be set up through the GateKeeper Admin program, and are restricted to a Work Area – the one selected when you open the Admin program. The start of the process is starting GateKeeper Admin as below.

Select the relevant Work Area and click Next to continue.

@PCSchool 6/13

1. Poll for NEW REQUESTS – if any GateKeepers have reasons pending approval (within your Approval Station group), then this will bring them up immediately, although there may be a brief delay otherwise.

2. Approve – When an approval request is brought up, this button approves the request.

3. Disapprove – When an approval request is brought up, this button rejects the request.

4. Minimize – hides this window in system tray so that it doesn’t interfere with your usual work.

5. Manage – this is the only drop-down menu, which shows a number of options:

a. Reasons – manage the available reasons for Students, Boarders and Staff

b. Approval Stations – pick which reports should be used for Students, Boarders, Staff and Visitors within this group of GateKeepers, and create or delete the Approval Station groups.

c. Pending Requests – lists visitors currently signed in and provides an option to set their sign-out time (if they haven’t got their slip).

d. Messaging Requests – a new feature relating to sending emails and/or SMSs to the relevant contact (to be released in the next GateKeeper).

To start creating and editing Reasons, select Manage > Reasons.

1. Entity Type – The type of user that the reason should apply to (Student, Boarder, or Staff).

2. Reason Type - The type of reason you want to create, edit or delete (Arrival or Departure).

The following sections will describe the various contextual options available to different user and reason types.

@PCSchool 7/13

Student & Boarder Reasons

For Students (whether boarding or not), Reasons for arrivals or departures have the same options.

1. Existing Reason Options – Double click to edit or delete one.

2. Reason – The description to be saved as the reason for their arrival or departure.

3. Code – A character used to identify different reasons, which is appended onto the reason description when signing in or out. For example the new reason shown in the screenshot would be “No Reason [?]”.

4. Days – Select whether the reason should be counted towards days late (i.e. 1 day or 0 days)

5. Send SMS – Select whether an early notification SMS should be sent.

6. Send Email – Select whether an early notification Email should be sent.

7. Year – Select which year levels should have access to the selected reason.

8. Print a slip – if ticked, a slip will be printed to the relevent printer when a user signs in or out.

9. Print slip on Return – for departing reasons only: print a slip upon signing back in.

10. Needs Approval – if ticked, students that select this reason must wait for the reason to be approved in order for the slip to be printed and the arrival (or departure) to be recorded.

11. Save – Save the details in the input panel on the right-hand of the window (Create or Edit).

12. Delete – Delete the selected reason – note that the selected reasons details will be in the input panel on the right hand of the window.

13. Clear – To create a new reason, this will blank out the input panel.

The departing reasons follow the same rules for Students and Boarders alike, although the options are all available separately. For students the reports are available under:

Scholastic > Administration > Attendance and Behaviour Reports > Late or Early Departure,

while boarder reports are available under:

Scholastic > Administration > Class Reports.

@PCSchool 8/13

Staff

Staff members are able to sign in and out using the GateKeeper. This allows schools to incorporate a list of present staff members in their evacuation report, and report on the staff members’ arrivals and departures. Among the standard reports is a list of staff and their week of earliest sign-in and latest sign-out, and a total of hours.

1. Existing Reason Options – Double click on any to select them (Edit or Delete).

2. Reason – Description used when recording a staff members arrival or departure.

3. Code – A character used to uniquely identify the reason.

4. Days – Select whether this reason should be counted towards lates for reporting (1 day or 0 days).

5. Print a slip – If ticked, a slip will be printed for the staff member when they select this reason.

6. Is School based Activity – If ticked, this means the reason is counted as work-time, but is not considered to be on the school grounds. This option is only available when departing the school.

7. Save – Save the details in the input panel on the right-hand of the window (Create or Edit).

8. Delete – Delete the selected reason – note that the selected reasons details will be in the input panel on the right hand of the window.

9. Clear – To create a new reason, this will blank out the input panel.

Once staff are using GateKeeper, there are reports available under Scholastic > Administration > Staff Reports to show their earliest sign-in time and latest sign-out time, as well as straight forward listings.

@PCSchool 9/13

Spider Sign-In/Sign-Out

Staff can also use a spider control to sign in or out of campus if they should forget to use the GateKeeper. This can be denied by security at the discretion of the school, as with other controls (through the Administration control in Spider, via “update the controls text”).

The Sign-In/Sign-Out control uses the same settings as GateKeeper, so once its setup, your staff can use it online.

Vistors

Visitors to the school might include parents, contractors, etc. These visitors are not likely to be able to pick themselves from an existing list if at all, so they can instead choose other ways of identifying themselves such as their drivers licence number or having a photo taken by the GateKeeper. They are also unlikely to be coming to the school for a reasonably short list of purposes, so they are given the option to put in their own purpose or select from a small number defined by the school. These questions and purposes can be defined in the Configuration Editor in Spider. This is described in more detail in the “Spider Settings” section later on.

Approval Stations Setup

“Approval Stations” are a way of grouping a number of GateKeeper computers together. The approval station groups ensure that the relevant / nearby approving GateKeepers get the prompt for confirmation. Although you may not have reasons that require approval, its good practice to separate the approval stations and name them appropriately for the location, for both future-proofing and ease of understanding.

For an example, you might have two GateKeeper stations set up in the school’s reception area and another set up in the staff room. Creating two approval stations named “Reception” and “Staff Room” means that you can have two distinct groups even though the staff members won’t need approval (and therefore don’t require their own group). The reception staff would start GateKeeper Admin on their own computers and choose an Approval Station group like “Reception” while the GateKeeper (non-admin) will be started on the students’ GateKeeper computer with “Reception” selected too. If one of the reception staff are away from their computer, any other reception staff in the group can also approve or deny the approval request.

@PCSchool 10/13

Spider Settings

Most of the settings that will stay constant over time are available through the Spider Configuration Editor. The “configuration section” drop-down has two options that relate to GateKeeper:

GKSETUP – settings relating to the functional behaviour of the GateKeepers

GKSETUP_SCREEN – settings relating to the visual aspects of the screen including text

GateKeeper Functional Setup

The functional setup for the GateKeepers includes certain options several times for each user type. For example, the Staff can use their barcode for GateKeeper while the students might already have their student registration number on their student ID cards. Another example is how names are displayed – i.e. surname or given name first.

Other options include whether students should pick themselves out by House, Form Class, or Form Teacher, and whether year levels should be sorted in ascending or descending order.

This section also includes several options relating to Visitors’ options. These include the quick-purpose options, what the additional questions are, and whether to try to take photos of visitors.

The full list of configuration settings is expanding slowly with each version, and a full description is provided against each option, as below:

@PCSchool 11/13

GateKeeper Screen Setup

The screen setup of GateKeeper determines the visual aspects of the GateKeeper such as what text you want to appear on labels and buttons. In the next release of GateKeeper, you will now be able to customise the logo and colours of the GateKeeper.

Welcome Screen

Select the text that prompts for a barcode to be scanned, and the button to select yourself from a list.

Pick the background and font colour for items in lists (i.e. Select your year level, select the first initial of your surname, select your name)

@PCSchool 12/13

The text on the Arrival and Departure buttons can be customised such as “Sign In” and can be specific to teachers or students

The colours available are “HTML Colours” and can be found on the following link: http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colornames.asp

@PCSchool 13/13

Software and Hardware Requirements

GateKeeper itself needs to run within Microsoft .NET Framwork 4 and uses SAP Crystal Reports for printing slips. In terms of hardware, almost any Windows compatible hardware is fine. Since the requirements are quite low, there is a broad spectrum of GateKeepers hardware at different schools.

At one end of the spectrum, some schools have their GateKeeper installed on an all-in-one PC in a wall mounting bracket, with a barcode scanner attached. While its not required, hardware such as a barcode scanners and webcams can provide additional functionality that the GateKeeper has to offer. Touch-screens are definitely prefered and many schools find a larger touch-screen’s area much more comfortable.

On the conservative end of the spectrum, some schools run the GateKeeper from a laptop or desktop computer sitting on a desk in their reception. This can be done using older hardware that you might even have sitting unused in your IT department already.

GateKeeper doesn’t need expensive hardware to run, although it may affect the speed at which people can use the station. Having this wide array of options means many schools initially setup GateKeeper on a single computer in preparation, and buy the hardware once they have an idea of what they are going to need.