I'm currently researching a way to combine the Science Museum of Minnesota's process of scanning driver's licenses to import constituent data into Tessitura with general CC processing. Does anyone know of a dual magnetic strip/bar code scanner/reader on the market that's approved by Element? It must also be compatible with the microchip credit cards.
Is anyone experimenting with this technology and composite bar codes?
Any direction would be greatly appreciated. Please and thank you!
The EMV-capable readers must all be validated by Element -- I believe there are three different options currently, and more will be coming as the EMV rollout continues. You can contact Element directly for information on which readers are currently supported.
I would say it is very unlikely that you will find a single device that fulfills your needs, for two reasons: 1). Element is unlikely to validate devices that have extraneous functionality not needed by the majority of merchants. 2). Given the need for security at the credit card terminal, I would expect that all of the integrated input devices (MSR, NFC radio, SCR) are encrypted immediately, and communicate with the tessitura application on a "secure channel" of sorts. I'd be very surprised if you were able to find an element-validated EMV terminal that can behave like a typical keyboard-emulation swipe that types directly into a field in Tessitura.
Also consider that EMV terminals are customer-facing, and the EMV transaction is designed such that the software operator does not need to interact with the CC terminal at all.
So, my recommendation would be to consider the data entry and CC processing issues as separate. The CC terminal is going to be pretty well prescribed to you by element, but for barcode and magstripe data entry, you have thousands of devices to choose from, and none of the security concerns associated with payment processing. There appear to be a number of "ID Scanners" that read magstripes and also barcodes from licenses in a card swipe-style form factor. You'd need to find one that does keyboard emulation for it to work with Tessitura--and that barcode scanner would likely not suit your needs for ticket scanning, if you need to do that at the POS. At our organization we will likely end up with three devices at the POS after we implement EMV: the CC terminal facing the customer, a standard magstripe reader attached to the side of the computer monitor, and a barcode scanner on the desk for scanning tickets or anything else (a 2D imager in this form factor would work for tickets, IDs, QR codes, what have you).
Nick, thank you for your very detailed response! After posting this, I was able to research Element's options. You are correct, only three options - all of which are magnetic strip readers only. I've reached out to their sales team to see if there are any other options, but I'm not optimistic.
As for the keyboard emulation, I'm not sure if that will be necessary. With the script provided by Joe Zielinski from Minnesota, the process uses a third-party program called autohotkey, "a scripting language for desktop automation." Basically, the program briefly stores the data from the license, sends a message to Tessitura to import the data into a constituent record, and then deletes all superfluous information (i.e. driver's license number).
However, looking to the future, if I want to attempt to incorporate composite bar codes into this process, I may have to dig a little deeper. I don't even know if that would be possible.
You mentioned you will end up with three devices at the POS once implementing EMV. What are your ticket-buying processes that require so much equipment?
Using Autohotkey is very clever! "Keyboard emulation" is just how the data gets from the scanner/reader into the system, without the use of specialized driver software for the device -- AHK is probably catching that same input, then processing it and inputting to tessi itself.
Can you explain what you would be using the composite bar codes for? I'm sure you could read them easily with a 2D barcode scanner, and then leverage AHK to get the data where you need it.
The three devices we will have are EMV terminal, magswipe, and barcode scanner. The EMV terminal is customer-facing and only used for payment processing. We will keep the magswipe around because the EMV terminal is NOT a substitute for it -- if we want to swipe a student ID, or if a customer has trouble using the EMV terminal, or if we are processing payment from a donor's card in the backoffice, we can still get a card present transaction by using the swipe (for the liability shift to work, we just need to keep these to <5% of card present transactions). Also, we use double-sided tape to attach these swipes to the side of a mounted monitor, so there's really no impact on desk space. The only other device is a barcode scanner, and we use one at our box office window just to speed up ticket returns and order lookups, since all of our tickets are printed with barcodes.