▲ 5 r/sysadmin
Three weeks evaluating VMS platforms and every demo is making me angry. Hoping someone here has solved this.
600 users, 4 sites, one site can't be cloud. Right now reception types visitor names into access control to cut a day badge. It's fine until it isn't.
Every sales rep shows up with a cloud dashboard, then deflates when I mention we need on-prem. The "hybrid" ones turn out to mean "you can VPN to our cloud."
What I actually need:
- Visitor checks in, temp credential auto provisioned in access control, expires when it should. Real provisioning, not an email to security
- Pre-registration that pushes to access control before the visitor shows up
- Real hybrid or on-prem
- Works with our Mercury hardware (mix of EP and MP). Software can change, controllers can't
- Different flows for different visitor types. Contractors need COI verification before a badge cuts. VIPs need pre arrival notifications to the host. Interview candidates need a flow that doesn’t make them feel like they’re checking into a federal building.
- Unified audit trail across visitor events and access events
- Entra SSO, audit logs, all 4 sites from one console
Already ruled out:
- Verkada: proprietary hardware, no Mercury support
- Brivo: cloud-only, plus confirmed we would be over their door count at two sites
- Genea: cloud-only, and access control side felt thin for what we need
- LenelS2: looked at OnGuard, the migration path off our current setup got ugly fast
Looking for something where VMS and access control are tightly integrated, not glued together with emails, manual steps, or fragile middleware.
If you’ve integrated VMS with a Mercury based access control in a hybrid setup, what are you running?
u/EffectiveActivity922 — 6 days ago