We provide ticketing services for a number of local festivals and they're very keen on barcode scanning on entry (it's something our competitors offer). I'm loathe to offer N-Scan as a remote service as even with an internet connection (at best, ADSL; usually, 3G mobile shared with a few thousand festival goers; at worst, nothing) as it's not a good service with high latency.
The offline mode of NScan is not sufficient as it would not check for duplicates. Several scanners would be needed at each event, covering multiple entrances.
The only solution I can think of is to have a laptop on site running a backup of our Tessitura database and the NScan service, and set up our own local wifi network.
Has anyone tried this kind of setup? Is it feasible?
Alternatively, has anyone used a third party barcode scanning service instead of N-Scan that works better in a local environment?
Ian:
The serious challenge to this (for which no software solution currently exists in Tessitura) is that there would be no way to re-import the scanned status of ticket records into the parent instance, which somewhat defeats the purpose of doing ticket scanning.
The order import utility in Tessitura can import ticket records as printed, but has no facility to record their scanned status. Complicating this would be the presumed continuing sales and printing of tickets in the parent instance of Tessitura, so although you would be able to import tickets sold locally, the ticket numbers they had in the local instance would not match the ticket numbers in the parent instance. Since the scanning record table uses ticket record as a primary key, this would significantly complicate any import of those records.
It might be better to look into leasing a high-speed wired line to the site(s), then set up a secured network for N-Scan use only, making the network private, non-broadcasting and secured with a password so that the festival-goers can’t either find or use it – then connect the N-Scan devices to that network, allowing them to reach your N-Scan web service remotely.
Jonathan
Thanks Jonathan. Due to the location of these events no kind of remote connection is possible (the only possibility would be wireless, and there's not a current solution which would be both reliable and cost-effective).
The primary purpose of using NScan for festivals would be to prevent fraud (particularly duplicate tickets), so the re-importing is actually not particularly important.
I have a feeling that a third party barcode scanning system might end up being the only possibility, that will merely validate the codes against an export of NScan numbers and check for duplicates. If anyone has tried such a system I'd be interested to hear.