Re: Tech question - interface between receiver and central station software

["Greene Security NZ" <gs_newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi there, hey thanks for all the tips and comments everybody. I am very
"green" to all this as I have only been working in the security
industry for a matter of months now, having spent the last 12 or so
years in the computer industry. I understand basically what the
templates are, such as Contact.ID, etc. They provide the interpretation
for the data stream that comes from the receiver. Simple enough?

The pricing I mentioned, of $50,000 is just something I pulled out of a
hat. In reality, I have been unable to obtain pricing for the product I
was looking at, which is called Alarm Center
(http://www.securitysoftware.com) as they repeatedly ask me for the
configuration of our current system, number of clients, etc, etc, etc
before they will give me pricing. Surely someone in the security
industry would understand that I am not authorised to give out that
kind of information. Duh!

Anyway, yes, I am slowly going to develop my own in-house system, so
Robert L. Bass, your offer of assistance and advice is gratefully
appreciated. I'm going to need all the help I can get. As for XML, I
haven't even looked at that yet.

If anybody has a good database schematic (ERD) for a simple alarm
monitoring system I would really like to take a peek. I'm currently
finding all kinds of pitfalls with the database design, and can see
that my elementary knowledge of Normalisation (sorry, Normalization for
the Americans amongst us) is going to be seriously put to the test on
this project!

For instance, putting the patrol and monitoring information together in
the Client table was dumb, as it slowly dawned on me that you can have
a client with monitoring but no patrol, or vice versa, and also either
the patrol or the monitoring could be provided by a third party! Oops!
As you can see, my lack of experience in the security industry is going
to make this a tough ride.

Anyway, thanks again for all the advice.

Rob.