The Open Platform Communications (OPC) Server plugin integrates the OPC Server with Security Center for external systems that have an OPC Client interface. Clients and servers must use the same protocol to communicate with each other.
The OPC Server plugin is a communication protocol plugin that hosts an OPC compliant server. The plugin exports camera, area, and door entities as OPC objects, using the OPC Unified Architecture (UA) protocol. The plugin exposes the logical identifiers of camera, area, and door objects. It also indicates the state of the door objects (open or closed, and locked or unlocked) and camera objects (online or offline, and recording started or recording stopped).
The plugin forwards video and access control events to OPC Clients, following the recommendations in "Part 9: Alarms and Conditions", OPC Unified Architecture Specification. Events are raised on the camera, area, and door objects to which the events relate. If an access control event is related to a cardholder, the cardholder's name and credential are also provided as event information. The event reporting hierarchy follows the logical hierarchy of the objects; if you monitor an area on a client workstation, you receive events from cameras, areas, and doors within that area.