Rollout

Getting a campus from “signed up” to “live at the gate” is a short, guided path. This page walks the six steps the way your school experiences them, then shows what a pilot looks like across a few campuses.

The six steps

1. Kickoff — we provision your campus

We stand up your campus with you and create the first admin account. There is no IT project and no database work — provisioning is a guided step that takes minutes, and your admin can sign in as soon as it completes.

2. Roster import — load your learners

Your admin imports learners, guardians, badges and classes from a spreadsheet. It is a preview-then-commit flow: every row is validated and you see exactly what will be created — valid rows, and any rows that need fixing with the reason why — before anything is written. You can correct rows and re-check, then commit. Guardian contact details are encrypted at rest on the way in. Importing classes alongside learners means the class roll-up and class-teacher views populate immediately.

3. Badges — map each learner to a tag

Each learner is mapped to their NFC badge (through the roster import, or one at a time). Each campus also uses its own encryption key for learner photos, provisioned before any photos are stored — no key, no photo storage, by design.

4. Training — get staff comfortable

The people who run the system get a short walk-through of their part:

• Officers learn the gate — tap a badge, confirm the face, choose how the learner is released, and read the green/amber confirmation. It is deliberately simple.
• Class teachers learn their scoped workspace — the daily roll and pickup approvals for their assigned classes.
• Admins learn the dashboard, the queues, and the settings that match how your campus actually runs.

5. Channels — switch on how guardians are reached

App push and branded email are ready out of the box once your sending domain is verified. WhatsApp is included and needs no account of your own — your admin switches it on for the school in Settings, and each guardian confirms their number once before we send to it; until a guardian has confirmed, their messages travel by email, honestly, never a fake send. SMS is the only channel you connect a provider for, and only if you want it. Set your quiet hours and going-home policy here too. See Notifications.

6. Go-live review — confirm you’re ready

Your admin dashboard shows a live go-live checklist that tells you what is left before you open the gate. When it is all green, the officer starts scanning.

What go-live readiness looks like

You are ready to open the gate when, in plain terms:

• Most learners are badged and scanning — the roster is imported and the large majority of active learners have badges and have been checked in at least once.
• Staff are trained and active — enough officers, class teachers and admins are set up to cover the gate and the classrooms.
• Guardians can be reached — app push and email are live, and any paid channels you want are connected.
• Photo encryption is ready — the per-school key is provisioned.

Your campus branding and policy — display name, logo, colours, default language, late-arrival threshold, pickup curfew, quiet hours, going-home policy, visitor fields, gate zones and school calendar — all live in Settings, set to match how your campus really runs.

The shape of a pilot

A typical pilot runs about five weeks per campus and proves the whole loop on real data — never seeded, always built through the app:

Week	Focus
1	Kickoff and roster import — your campus is provisioned and your learners are loaded.
2	Badges and training — tags mapped, officers and staff walked through their screens.
3	Channels and go-live — notifications connected, the go-live checklist driven to all-green, the gate opens.
4	Live operation — officers scan every day, dashboards run live, guardians feel the difference.
5	Review — you look at real attendance, real notifications, and a real usage picture, and decide on the wider group.

Rolling out across a group

For a group, pilot two or three campuses through the full loop first, so there is real data behind the story, then repeat the campus loop for the rest. Each onboarding is a few minutes of setup plus the roster, staff and channel work.

Honest note: onboarding today is one campus at a time, and group-wide oversight runs through the MySentinel team — a single group-owner login scoped to only your campuses is on the roadmap. Naming that plainly during rollout is part of how MySentinel earns trust: the same honesty the product shows to parents, carried into the rollout conversation.