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SO, WHAT HAPPENS OFFLINE?
These days the internet is quite reliable and dropouts are rare. The internet has become critical infrastructure, much like electricity. Any longer dropout, impacting more than a single building is a dramatic affair, something you would probably hear about in the evening news. Similar, if not higher availability standards are expected from hosting platforms and cloud services. Anyway, we can never exclude the possibility of the user, or some part of the systems going offline.
Door Cloud has a whole range of features designed specifically for dealing with internet dropouts. The goal is providing uninterrupted service as much as it is realistically possible under the circumstances. Let’s look at some possible scenarios:
PHONE DEAD
This is probably the most frequently asked question – what happens if the phone battery dies or the phone gets lost or broken. Goes without saying, if you use cards, you can always use your card instead of the phone. Actually, that is one of the reasons why anyone would still want to use cards: no battery.
If having a reserve card is important enough to carry it around as a spare, is another question. If it is, have a card somewhere with you, in your car or your briefcase.
PHONE OFFLINE
Sometimes it may happen the user is without signal or data service. The solution is Zone BT Option, a USB dongle for direct communication between the controller and the phone via Bluetooth. The dongle attaches to the Zone Spot controller and provides a secure Bluetooth connection to nearby phones. This option is recommended on all doors where we expect weak or no signal, for example, an underground garage with weak or no WiFi.
CONTROLLER OFFLINE
The quality of the internet connection in this case is entirely up to the local network, so dropouts may happen for a number of reasons. Luckily, Zone controllers have been designed for offline operation and have all necessary access control information stored locally. This information is constantly synchronised while online, and the latest snapshot will be used while offline. This means that cards and readers will work normally while offline. However, for the mobile phone to work in offline mode, we would need Zone BT Option.
SERVICE OFFLINE
In this rather unlikely scenario, both controller and the phone will be in effect offline. Cards and readers will work normally, and phones will work in offline mode on doors with Zone BT Option. Another thing to note is that while the service is offline, no changes to access permissions can be made.
KEY LINK USE
In case of the Key Link, things are somewhat different. Key Link will work only if all system components are online. To be on the safe side in case of phone failure, the guest should be instructed to keep the phone number of the host on paper. Then, provided that they still have an usable phone around, and that the system is online, they will be able to call the host and ask them to open the door remotely.
ADDITIONAL NOTES
To fully understand the offline capabilities of Door Cloud it is worth noting that access permissions are always validated by the controller and can be updated only directly from the Door Cloud while online. The mobile app is never used for validating access permissions, it only provides identification.
