Recently, Clemson has added a new feature to the TigerOne card, moving in a technologically advanced direction with huge success. The card can now be added and accessed from the online Apple Wallet. While this specific feature was just now implemented, the idea has been around for a while.
“The idea goes back a couple of years. Our planning for the future involved the vision that we would have one day a mobile ID. We were originally approached by our card vendor, HID, about deploying in a pilot program their mobile ID,” Steve Robbins, executive TigerOne director, said. ‘‘In 2017 we had a group of students living in Core housing back then, honors specifically, who volunteered to be the first adopters of the mobile ID.”
For the setup, only a few ‘basic’ details were involved.
“The mobile ID involved the downloading of an app, the provisioning of an ID that was more like a credential. It didn’t have the person’s name on it. It didn’t have the person’s photo on it; so it functioned like a card, but didn’t have all the extra components,” Robbins said.
This year, on the day of the release, in just a few short hours, the number of users quickly jumped from hundreds to thousands.
“By 11 o’clock we were already at 1,600… One day later we had over 4,500. Now that’s a combination of watch and info,” Robbins said. “The biggest success was how quickly the campus embraced a digital ID… The numbers have only crept up from here.”
While some users may had already known about the feature due to previous beta testing, the overall response was total positivity.
“On the first day, some of our original members on the board came to the office at eight o’clock and the announcement didn’t go out until 10 o’clock. You could see that at that 9:45, without anything being done we already had 118 individuals who had provisioned us,” Robbins said.
As newly created technology always seems to have its hitches, Robbins proudly states that there have been a very small number of problems reported.
“On that day of provisioning the fact that we launched it, had very few problems the first day and have had very few since points to this as a second success,” Robbins said.
However, there were a small number of hitches that came from the user side.
“We’ve had some issues, but those come in the more technical type of issues because you have to make sure your phone is up to date, my.Clemson is up to date, your phone is actually a compatible device… a few particular pieces that have to be correct before it works,” Robbins said.
Despite that, there seem to be no other technical glitches that the TigerOne or Apple team are trying to update and fix. Currently, TigerOne is working to bring this new feature to other platforms besides Apple as well.
“The first con goes to that it’s really only currently available for the Apple platform. The con would be that it’s not available, say for the Android platform,” Robbins said. “We are working with the computing board on an Android solution.”
Regarding the future success of the mobile ID, it is possible to completely disregard the physical cards, although not very plausible. There is still work that would need to be done to completely achieve this goal.
“Once we’ve come up with an Android platform solution, we’ve probably closed the gap considerably in terms of reasons still to issue an ID card,” Robbins said. “Essentially, we’re positioning ourselves for the day where we could be 100% digital.”
And while the implementation of this new advancement has been useful for all users, Robbins still suggests that despite the mobile option for TigerOne to continue bringing your physical card everywhere. It doesn’t have to be used as frequently but can be relied upon as a back-up for just in case purposes.
