Your Next Smart Office, Part One: Keyless Entry

If you’re using plastic cards or a punch-in system to get into your office, you have a few more options to make your life a little easier, but alas, they’ve gotten us to this point. These include:

   
• Badges
   
• Key cards
   
• Locks that require codes to be entered
   
• Key fobs

The great thing about technology is that it can make our lives easier. Here’s a quick look at the options you have with keyless entry for your office.

A mix of hardware and software

Trying to ditch a little bit of the hardware, these folks use a combination of the cloud, wifi and a smartphone app to achieve the same goal.

‍Kisi: Brooklyn-based Kisi is a cloud-based solution that lets you use your smartphone, wifi, and their proprietary box to control office access. The app is permission-focused, to give you control over who has access to doors and different entrance points based on their role, etc.

Lockitron: Lockitron’s product, Bolt, uses a combination of bluetooth and a mobile app to let you lock and unlock doors with just a swipe. Rather than a box being placed in your office, it hooks onto the latch of the deadbolt on your door.

Kevo: Kevo by Kwikset uses a proprietary deadbolt lock, bluetooth and touch to gain entrance. Basically, you keep your phone in your pocket, and because the smart deadbolt picks up bluetooth signals from your phone, you can get through the door just by touching the lock with your finger.

RFID wristbands and bracelets

RFID bracelets are an interesting blend of the above that you wear on your wrist. There needs to be some sort of hardware access point, like a box with a sensor that sits outside the door to read the bracelet. Here’s an example that’s used to gain access into the office.

‍Hubspot: All employees wear them from day one of employment, to gain access into the office, as well as to retrieve swag and office equipment from vending machines throughout their space.

Although RFID wristbands have been known to be successful in the festival and event spaces for registration, etc., they’re finally starting to make their way into offices.

An Emphasis on Security

Permission-based activities are more of the norm now than ever. From Google Docs to other SaaS products like Cloudflare, having control over who can do and access what, provides a better sense of security. Keyless Entry, like the options above, will give you the control to be able to grant access and track usage of your most precious entrances.

Connecting the Dots

There’s a ton of data to be collected on the office and how we interact with the things in it. Keyless Entry is just the first part. In this series we’ll be featuring a few other pieces that will make up the future of the smart office, and with that, a more efficient workplace.