Gordons Partnership Solicitors
Reception check-in and boardroom displays
Two touchscreens in the same building, both reading from systems the firm already runs. Reception signs in staff, clients and contractors; a tablet outside the boardrooms shows what is booked.
the brief
Everyone coming into the building signed a paper book: staff, clients and contractors alike. A paper book tells you who wrote in it, not who is still in the building.
The boardrooms had a paper problem of their own. Front of house printed the day's schedule, and printed it again every time something moved, which on a normal day was more than once.
A sign-in book is also a data problem sitting in plain sight. It lies open on the desk with every visitor's name and who they came to see, and it keeps them for as long as the book lasts.
what was built
- A terminal on the reception desk, in reach of front of house and of anyone walking in.
- Staff sign in with their company fob on the reader. One tap, in or out, no menu to work through, and a sound so you know it took without looking up. Or they find their name in a list that comes from the firm's own Active Directory, photographs included, so nobody uploads anything.
- Clients sign in on an on-screen keyboard, so the tablet's own keyboard never gets in the way, read the site rules, and choose who they are visiting. More than one host can be told, and they are told straight away.
- Contractors sign themselves in and out under their own company name. Car registrations are taken for both.
- Check out as well as in, so the list is who is in the building rather than who arrived.
- A fire list that is the point of the whole thing: the headcount, everyone on site with who they are visiting and what they are driving, a column to tick them off, and one button that emails it to whoever is running the roll call.
- It flags anyone still signed in from the day before, and tells the last person out to set the alarm and lock up.
- Door releases from the admin screen, each one logged against the person who pressed it.
- A dashboard showing how many are in, split by fob, screen and reception, the busiest hour, and the average time on site.
- A tablet outside the three boardrooms: what is on now, what is next, and a day timeline with the time marked on it. An Engaged button covers a conversation nobody booked, and a real booking always overrides it.
- That tablet handles recurring meetings, their exceptions, and Outlook's habit of publishing a moved occurrence as a separate thing without cancelling the original. The feeds are warmed every two minutes, so the screen never waits on Exchange, and a short or truncated response is refused rather than allowed to overwrite a good copy.
- Both are Android units running Fully Kiosk, remotely managed and monitored, on a power schedule that shuts them down at the end of the day and has them ready the next morning. The application runs on the firm's own internal server.
outcome
The building knows who is in it, and the boardrooms answer for themselves. Nothing is printed, and neither screen needs anyone to keep a second list up to date.
The day's summary is written at close and the live data is cleared behind it, so a visitor's name sits in the building's systems for a working day rather than for as long as a book lasts. Fourteen months of daily summaries have accumulated since, without anybody filing one.
- client
- Gordons Partnership Solicitors
- sector
- Legal
- disciplines
- application design, hardware integration, kiosk deployment
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