The Arcules Plugin for Milestone XProtect provides a one-way integration from Arcules to XProtect where Arcules video and alarms are made accessible to users in Milestone XProtect. Milestone Interconnect™ license is required. Local live video with the Arcules Plugin for XProtect is currently not supported.

The Arcules XProtect Plugin will work with XProtect Corporate 2020 R1 and up.

For XProtect Corporate 2020 R1 the following patch is required:

https://supportcommunity.milestonesys.com/s/article/XProtect-2020-R1-cumulative-patch-installers?language=en_US

For XProtect Corporate 2020 R3 the following patch is required:

https://supportcommunity.milestonesys.com/s/article/XProtect-2020-R3-cumulative-patch-installers?language=en_US

To enable the integration, users must have the IT Manager role with the permission to create and manage users. To authenticate the connection from Arcules to XProtect, an Arcules user with the role of API User must be created. The API user authenticates the connection for live video, recorded video, and alarms and is used when setting up the connection in the XProtect Management Client.

Navigate to the Arcules portal, and select the 'People' Page from the Navigation bar.

To add a user, click the blue '+' symbol, and a modal will appear.

In the 'Add a User' Modal, the Last Name is optional and an email is required to send an invite to a user to complete registration.

Important: you must use a valid email address that you have access to complete registration through the Arcules registration email. You will also need a mobile phone to complete registration.

Once you have created the user, view the details for the user to continue the set-up.

Assign the user a Role of “API User”. This will give the connection access to live, playback, and alarms for Arcules devices in the XProtect system.

Next, choose which sites/locations you want to enable the connection for. You can create multiple API users if you want multiple connections in XProtect.

Once you have assigned a Role and Sites/Location access, click “Send Invite”. An email will be sent to the email address you used while creating the user.

Once you receive the registration email, click the “Register” link and follow the steps to begin the registration process. Click here to view the registration process help guide.

Once you have registered the user, you can now create the connection to Arcules in the XProtect Management Client for live, playback, and alarms.

To send alarms to XProtect, you must create a rule in the Arcules portal. Rules can be set-up to trigger alarms e.g. based on video analytics or device health events. The API user previously created must be added to the alarm action directly or through a user group. A help article on creating Rules and Video Analytics can be viewed here:

Rules

Configuration Video Analytics

Once you have created an API user with a role and location access, you can now login to the XProtect Management Client and set-up the Arcules XProtect Plugin to enable the connection.

To download the latest version of the Arcules XProtect Plugin, login to the Arcules portal and select the "Settings" icon and navigate to the "Download Apps" option.

Click "Download"

The Arcules Plugin is composed of two components for XProtect.

The MIP Plugin is responsible for the configuration UI in Milestone Management Client and for alarm synchronization. For this reason, it must be installed on every workstation where XProtect Management Client will be used, and it must also be installed on the server running the XProtect Event Server.

The MIP Driver is responsible for bringing video from Arcules (both live and playback) into XProtect. For this reason, the MIP Driver must be installed on XProtect Recording Servers used when adding Arcules devices to XProtect.

The Arcules XProtect Installer will automatically detect which plugin (MIP Plugin, MIP Driver or both) must be installed on a specific machine, based on the installed XProtect components (Recording Server, Event Server and/or Management Client).

Prior to installing the integration,

To install the Arcules XProtect Plugin integration, run Arcules-Connector.msi as Administrator, then follow the steps below.

Click Next.

Click Auto-detect.

This step will determine which XProtect components are installed on the current machine and will automatically decide which plugin (MIP Plugin and MIP Driver) will be installed. If you want more control over what is being installed, click “Custom” instead.

Click Install and wait for the Arcules Plugin to install. XProtect Recording service and XProtect Event service will be restarted during the install (if they are present on the current machine).

Click Finish.

Once the Arcules XProtect Plugin is installed, the integration can be configured using the XProtect Management Client application. The sections below describe how to configure the different aspects of the integration.

First, a connection to Arcules must be created. To do this, open XProtect Management Client and scroll down the Site Navigation tree until the Arcules Cloud Services item is visible.

Select "Connections", then right-click and select “Add New…”

A new connection will be created, and the following fields will have to be filled by the user:

Name Unique name representing this connection.

Cloud Region: The Arcules Cloud region where XProtect will connect to retrieve video and alarms.

Username/Password: The credentials of the user-created as described in the “Adding a User” section of this article.

Before saving the connection, first, click on the “Test Connection” button to make sure the Arcules Cloud server is reachable and that the specified cloud address and credentials are valid.

Click the "Save" button at the top left of the window.

In order to add Arcules Locations and cameras to XProtect, click on the “Devices” tab, at the bottom of the window.

Click "Add"

In the Add Location dialog, make sure you select:

Click "Close"

To start synchronizing alarms from Arcules into XProtect, enter the “alarms tab” and make sure the “Sync Alarms from Arcules” checkbox is checked. Please note, you must configure an Arcules rule with the action to “Trigger an alarm” and assign it to the API users you authenticated the Milestone connection with. This is described in the above section “Sending alarms to XProtect” in this article.

From the page, you can also specify from which date synchronization will start and at which interval the synchronization will be performed.

Important note: Alarms are synchronized based on their last modified date. This means that even if the integration is configured to not synchronize alarms prior to a certain date, alarms created before that date might still be synchronized if they are modified in Arcules (for example, if a user assigns an alarm to himself).

In the event, you have modified a location by adding or deleting cameras from the Arcules portal, log in to the Milestone Management client to check for updates.

Select "Modify"

Click "Check for updates"

If updates are available, check the relevant cameras and click "Save".

Problem: In XProtect Smart Client, the source of alarms originating from Arcules is set to the Arcules connection name instead of the camera.

Problem: The “Arcules Plugin” item doesn’t appear in the navigation tree of XProtect Management Client

Problem: Alarms created in Arcules do not appear in XProtect Smart Client.

Problem: Locked out of Arcules portal account

In addition to the normal logs created by XProtect, additional logs created for the MIP Plugin are found in the %ProgramData%\VideoOS\ArculesMIPPlugin folder. A different subfolder is created for every process that loads the plugin.