Presence Integration - Reserve First Swipe FAQ

Can we implement First Swipe without implementing a User Management Process (UMP)?

Answer: It depends. First Swipe requires an email address of the user that badged into the building (in the badge data feed). This needs to match the user’s email address in their Reserve profile. If your presence event source system can provide the email address in the data, then a UMP is not required.  In the event that you cannot provide the email address (that matches to the user’s email address in Reserve), then we will need a different way to map the presence event to the user in Reserve (like some sort of unique id). If that is the case, then a UMP may be needed.

Here are the minimum data requirements for First Swipe

What is the PLAI Open Listener account? Is the PLAI Open Listener account within Tango Reserve or are there other third parties involved?

Answer: For the PLAI account, we call these (because there could be others) as service accounts in Reserve and create these for their specific roles. We use one for the Kiosk, one for PLAI etc. This allows customers to manage the account and make sure that it only has access levels it needs. Each service account is specific to its role. In this case, it would be the equivalent of a service account that would be used for the Reserve UMP but is used for processing presence events and can only perform that function.  It only exists in Reserve and is not used by any 3^rd party.

What protocol will be used to push the data to the PLAI Open Listener account?

Answer: The PLAI interface operates over HTTPS 443.

Is SQL Server 2022 supported for a) First Swipe and b) UMP?

Answer: The latest version we have verified to be functional with UMP and First Swipe is up to SQL Server 2022. 

What protocol and what port numbers are used to connect to the Reserve Integration database and the UMP database? i.e, for Badge Reader Integration and for User management? How does First Swipe and the UMP authenticate to the database?

Answer: If MS SQL Server is being used, the connection protocol and port is TCP port 1433 by default, but the SQL Server port is configurable so the UMP and First Swipe solutions can be configured to use the port being used by the SQL Server instance in the environment.  The authentication to the database can be established using SQL Server authentication OR using an integrated trusted connection.

Provide configuration information including a) database connection string b) SMTP server connection information both for Badge Reader Integration and for the User Management (UMP) and any other Reserve SQL server, and UMP configuration information.

Answer: This information can be provided as part of the deliverables with the solution.  The client is responsible for meeting the SOE and providing the server environment that hosts the solution along with access to an SMTP server.  This means that this information is client driven.  We do provide the configuration information for the solution as part of the deliverables.

Describe how Python is used to connect to the database.

Answer: Python is used to establish the connection to the database to execute SQL statements against the database which perform the ETL process and push the resulting data into Tango Reserve using the Reserve API calls. 

Python ODBC is not part of the standards at our company, what other database connection mechanisms does the solution support?

Answer:  Pyodbc is the connection mechanism in use for the purposes of the UMP and First Swipe when using MS SQL Server as the database.   If there is another connection mechanism that the client would prefer to use that also works with Python and MS SQL Server we can conduct research to see if this can be used in the solution.  This will (of course) involve additional time and effort to research.  I could not give you an estimate on the time and effort for the research at this time

Can the JDBC be supported for the Badge Reader Integration and for the User Management process?

Answer: The UMP and First Swipe solutions do not use JDBC.

Where and how are the database passwords stored for Security Badge Integration and for the User Management Process? Are the passwords encrypted? Describe the encryption mechanism.

Answer: If you are referring to the passwords being used by the UMP or First Swipe to connect to the MS SQL Server database during the ETL processes, then they would either reside in the configuration files in your environment. Another option is for you to use a trusted connection for the database connections.