Everything in one tab. And everything from the same house.

The problem it goes after is not technical, it is about people. There are organisations with twenty, fifty or two hundred locations —shops, clinics, gyms, schools— where nobody knows about security and has no reason to. There the classic system does not break: it gets abandoned.

The answer is to take away everything that has to be maintained. There is no server in the building, no client to install, no database to back up, no version to upgrade. You get in with a browser and there are the cameras, the doors, the intercoms and the visitors from every location at once.

That explains where it turns up: chains, franchises, schools, companies that open sites faster than they hire technicians. And places where the decision is not taken by the head of security, because there isn't one: IT decides, or operations decides.

At the door there is a networked controller that keeps its copy of permissions and schedules and decides locally. Above it there is nothing: it talks straight to the manufacturer's service. That simplicity is the product — there is no middle layer that can be configured badly because there is no middle layer.

And it has the other edge. The hardware is theirs and the service is theirs, and they go together. What you gain is that nothing integrates badly between pieces from the same house: the door and the camera watching it are on the same screen from day one. What you pay is that you cannot change the head end and keep the electronics. On a platform built on market controllers, changing software is changing software; here it is changing the cabinets.

The commercial model goes the same way: a subscription per door and per camera, over several years. There are two questions worth having by email before signing: what happens to the console in the year it is not renewed —the doors will carry on opening, because they decide locally, but the management is another matter— and how the history is extracted if one day you change platform.

The people, the permissions and the log are on the manufacturer's service; the video is recorded in the camera itself and goes up when it is asked for. With no line, the doors carry on opening and the cameras carry on recording, but everything that goes through the console falls over: removing somebody, opening remotely, watching live, receiving an alert.

And the uncomfortable part: since the console is the only place it is administered from, with no line it is not administered. If a location has a poor connection, that is solved beforehand with a second route, and it costs money that has to be budgeted for.

Data protection deserves a meeting of its own. Putting video and access together means the record of who came in carries their image alongside, and about workers that is the most sensitive thing in the installation: you have to inform the workforce and their legal representatives, justify what each part is used for and set how long it is kept and who looks at it. And, as a supplier from outside the European Union, ask in writing for the hosting region, the processor contract and the mechanism for the transfers.

It fits where there are many sites and few technical people, where the value is in somebody in a head office seeing the two hundred doors without travelling, and where the real alternative was not an enterprise platform: it was carrying on with a bunch of keys and a spreadsheet.

It does not fit when the specification asks for things this class of product is not built to cover: interlocks with logic of their own, deep zone hierarchies, fine evacuation headcounts, thorough integration with an intruder detection platform already fitted, or an audit that requires the data not to leave the house. Nor if there is a big investment in door electronics you wanted to keep.

There is a common middle case: a head office with serious requirements and forty branches with none. There the honest answer is often not one platform for everything, but two, each where it fits, and one common joiners and leavers procedure above both.

Joiners and leavers, schedules, permissions by zone, opening a door as a one-off, looking at who came in and passing a video to whoever needs it: the client runs all of that, and runs it well. In a chain you can give each manager the running of their own site and nothing else, and that is what keeps the list true: the person who knows the people is the person who adds them.

The caveat is that there are decisions that are not console decisions. Adding a door, changing what it does when the power goes, touching the link to the fire detection, redoing the synchronisation or changing how the system goes out to the internet. The ease of the tool has a real side effect: it invites people to touch things that look the same as granting a permission and are not.

What we hand over so they can: short training by role, the door map with its behaviour written down, who holds each role and why, and the sheet with the five likely problems and their answers. And a date in the calendar to review the credential list, because nobody does that one unless it is put there.

You keep the containment, the power supply, the door furniture and a good part of the locks. The readers have to be looked at one by one. You do not keep the controller, which is replaced, nor the server, which disappears.

The cards decide whether the migration is a weekend or a month. If the current ones can be read, the workforce never finds out; if they are encrypted with the previous manufacturer's keys, there is a reissue for everybody, and that is organised by floor or by shift with reception warned.

And the history is exported and kept separately before the old system is switched off. It is not going into the new one, and there are sectors where somebody will ask for it in two years' time.