PROMOTIONAL ARTICLE
Announced at IFSEC 2017, Milestone’s new XProtect products for small- and medium-sized enterprises allow installers to deliver tailor-made solutions, thanks to the flexibility of open platform solutions. Users gain all the benefits of third-party add-on solutions and high-end features, with the added security of a seamless upgrade path as and when their video requirements grow.
Milestone Systems recently released XProtect Essential+ alongside the Express+ and Professional+ offerings. These products cover all installations from those with only a handful of cameras to multi-site installations with thousands of cameras. Essential+ is a free entry-level product and provides a simple route into Milestone’s XProtect platform.
Tailor-made standard solutions
It may sound contradictory, but XProtect’s easy-to-use programming facilities allows installers or advanced users to adapt the software to fit a wide assortment of needs, thus providing tailor-made solutions with standard software. For example, these could include automatically changing the recording rate and camera behaviour according to alarms, so certain cameras can provide evidential quality when incidents occur.
All the products support hardware acceleration, where system performance is boosted with the addition of a dedicated graphics card that handles the ‘heavy lifting’ in decoding video, leaving room for the system to handle other tasks. By passing decoding to the graphics card, systems can save up to 80 per cent in processing power, with lower energy usage as a result.
Wide compatibility
Thanks to bi-monthly updates, Milestone software supports more than 6,000 certified devices, allowing installers to freely specify camera models and brands according to their customers’ needs. All the new products are fully supported by XProtect Smart Client, XProtect Web Client and Milestone Mobile, so users have multiple means of accessing their systems.
Start the right way with a free download
It is easy to experience all the benefits of open platform software, simply by downloading XProtect Essential+.
XProtect Essential+ can easily be upgraded to XProtect Express+ or other advanced XProtect products if the need arises to deliver extra functionality for interconnecting systems, encrypting video recordings or other advanced features.
The benefits of a truly open platform
For developers, free access to XProtect is an invitation to develop new and innovative video solutions and provides an opportunity to push video into new business areas. By including the Milestone open platform programming environment in its free Essential+ product, Milestone is handing over the keys to future innovation to developers.
All the tools needed to get started
XProtect Essential+ and the SDK can be downloaded at no cost from the Milestone website. Documentation, eLearning courses and an online developer forum are just some of the resources which Milestone also makes available to developers. XProtect VMS products are built on Microsoft and other industry standards, so any Microsoft-certified developer can start developing value-adding business video solutions right away. It is easy to imagine installers drifting into bespoke provision, given the simplicity of development made possible by Milestone.
Promoting your solutions
Milestone also offers marketing support for developers through its online Milestone Solution Finder, which showcases integrations to a global audience. The Milestone alliance partner team also provides certification of solutions with testing and full documentation.
Find out more at Milestone’s Integration Expo
Milestone is giving installers an opportunity to talk with specially selected Milestone community partners and see how integrated solutions are developed. The one-day event on 12 September 2017 at the DeVere Staverton Estate in Northamptonshire is free to attend and will bring together installers, developers, integrators and selected Milestone partners including Intelico, Ipsotek, NEDAP, ONCAM, Pivot3 and Zepcam.
In-depth educational sessions will give delegates the opportunity to see first-hand how these partners integrate with XProtect VMS. With hands-on access to the newest technologies, delegates will also be shown how they can develop their own innovative and customised solutions by integrating with XProtect.