Publishing user presence from access control systems

Providing user presence events to Calven unlocks several benefits:

• The ability to trigger “welcome” notifications
• Display “green ticks” on user avatars to let others know who has arrived at the office
• Enhanced Analytics for desk bookings, attendance and desk usage

Calven has a public API that customers can use to provide presence events - refer to http://apidocs.calven.com

Calven also has a specific API designed to accept presence events from access control systems.  These systems typically cannot work with the two-step token-based authentication of the standard Calven APIs.

The access control API endpoint supports BASIC authentication. To use these endpoints you will need to obtain a specific API key and secret from Calven support - support@calven.com

The access control API URL is https://api.calven.com/v1/presence/basic. This endpoint expects the same presence document as the regular endpoint.  The only difference is the use of BASIC authentication.

Sending presence from Integriti access control

Integriti is a popular access control solution and it can be configured to send presence events using this API.

To implement this solution, there are two pre-requisites:

• Integriti release 23 or later is required
• User records in Integriti must have user email addresses

You will also need some information from Calven support:

• Your API key and secret
• The location ids for the Calven locations where you want to report user presence

Once you have this information to create the presence integration:

1. Log in to Integriti System Designer.
2. Select the “Administration” tab, and then click on “Scheduled Tasks” in the toolbar.
3. Add a new scheduled task
4. Add a new trigger
5. Select a “Door/Area” trigger
   • Select one or more doors that you want to trigger the action.
   • You do not need to report every access event, so you would typically select entrance doors or lifts.
   
6. Select the “Actions” and add a new action
7. Select “Send HTTP Request” as the action type
8. At the time of writing, the “Basic authentication” fields in the Integriti action do not work. Authentication will be handled via headers later.
9. In the “Connection” section:
   1. Tick “Use https”
   2. Enter “443” for the port
   3. Enter “api.calven.com” as the address
   4. Enter “/v1/presence/basic” as the path
   
10. In the “Content” section:
    1. Set “Request Type” to “POST”
    2. Set “Media Type” to “Application”
    3. Set “Data format” to “JSON”
    4. Set “Configurable header keys” to “Authorization”
    5. You will need to compute the basic authentication header. Go to https://it-tools.tech/basic-auth-generator and enter the provided API Key as the username and the secret as the password. Copy the “Basic xxxxx” value and paste it into “Configurable Header Values”.  Do not include the “Authorization: ” in the value
    6. Click on the … next “body” and enter code (reach out to Calven Support for the details), substituting the provided location id. You may also need to change the user email field if you are using a different field in Integriti to store the email address.
       
       
    <<code to be supplied by Calven Support>>
    
    
11. Finally save the action and the task.