KeyLink
by BuildingLink®
The KeyLink Story
Confessions and Credits
Truth be told, we didn’t really want to be in the hardware business. We generally believe in “sticking to the knitting" (doing what we do best) and didn't think that hardware and firmware design was something that we could be good at. After all, the founder of our company has a PhD in psychology, not in electrical engineering. And yet, here we are many years later with our first KeyLink systems already in customers’ hands, and all indications are that we have produced a winner - possibly the very best key security hardware and software solution on the market today.
The KeyLink story is a Western genre familiar to us: (a) The bully arrives in town who seems to hold all the cards and call all the shots, (b) for many years the townsfolk powerless to respond have no choice but to swallow whatever is dished out, and wait for the day when they once again have a choice. (c) Motivated by the sense that “enough is finally enough”, a victorious effort is launched by an unlikely hero to topple the bully, and to return choice, dignity, victory and vindication to the townspeople. If the KeyLink story ever makes it as a movie, we would want to give credit to two individuals, who inspired this undertaking, and whose words are quoted below:
"Necessity is the mother of invention"
Plato, 427 BC, Ancient Greece
"When are you guys going to finally give us a better f**ing alternative?"
anonymous (but real) property manager with 20+ properties using BuildingLink, circa 2005, Manhattan
And of course, we want to thank KeyTrak. If not for their deaf ear to the complaints of their customers, we would not be where we are today, the proud parents of our spanking new invention.
2001, The Problem Surfaces
So the story begins in 2001. By that time, BuildingLink had started seeing a regular growth of its business in the Manhattan market, and in a significant number of its buildings, we would find a KeyTrak computer ..
2005; The Too-Good-To-Be-True Offer that was rejected
Because of this broader range of issues, sometime around 2005 we began discussing with the then-current KeyTrak New York representative, Mike Schadler, a new idea. We proposed to write at our expense a software extension to the BuildingLink platform that would allow us to directly control from within BuildingLink the KeyTrak drawers and key tags, without the need for customers to install any separate KeyTrak software. In essence, we proposed to write software that would mimic the commands being sent to the KeyTrak boxes through the parallel printer ports used by the KeyTrak software at that time. We proposed as well to charge customers nothing for this edition, and to allow KeyTrak control over the pricing and marketing of their drawer solution without any revenue sharing to us at all. It seemed like a no-fail proposition for them, they get to keep all the revenue and all the customers, they no longer need to handle software support calls, and they no longer have to hear from BuildingLink customers complaining about the dual computers and dual data entry. We even offered the possibility that we would undertake a certain amount of on-site service Corps work for them, so that they would not need to hit up their New York area customers with expensive airfare and hotel costs when providing on-site service.
By 2005, we were starting to conclude that while the New York sales division (Mike Schadler, Joe DeRossi) may have been fairly supportive of this idea, especially since they were running into the above-described situation and the customer dissatisfaction nearly every day, as they encountered more and more BuildingLink customers that were also using KeyTrak, the people at the Texas headquarters seemed nonresponsive. We were perpetually unsuccessful in our attempts to speak to Robert Brockman, the founder and CEO of the company. We did manage to finally get Robert Burnet - the company Treasurer - on the phone, who after a long pause ... to make them motivated to work collaboratively with anyone, as in fact was their reputation. We were finally starting to accept that KeyTrak probably had no intention of working with us in any significant way, and we began to interview engineering firms and intellectual property law firms in preparation for finally having to carve our own path toward "build" versus "buy".
2007-2008 - The Switch is Flipped
On March 3rd, 2008, after months of preliminary engineering and legal research, we sent a final communication to all of our KeyTrak contacts to date, informing them that we will be proceeding to produce our own solution, and that if they had any wish to instead work together, this would be their last chance. Well, actually we were a bit less polite than that, saying something to the effect that if we proceed we will proceed to build a much better system than theirs, and that if over the next two years they end up receiving a flatbed truck filled with discarded and retired KeyTrak boxes that have been replaced with our systems, they'd need only look back to the March 3rd conversation to know why and they'd have only their own short-sightedness to blame for it. Okay, so maybe those were “fighting words", but after 7 years of runarounds and listening to our (and their) clients complaints, do you blame us for feeling fed-up?
In total honesty, we did receive one token call from the New York team, suggesting once again that we try instead to use their add-on SmartLink program, (a simple data transfer program which speeds up the process of adding new residents to the database, but does nothing to resolve our clients’ growing complaints). But we received no response of substance, and no response at all from the people in power. And so, we finally bade farewell to seven years of naiveté, goodwill, and attempts at working collaboratively, and set out to finally build and deliver to our customers what they needed - the modern, efficient and integrated key security system they deserved.
2007-2009 - Design, Redesign, & Re-redesign
Those of you who have read this far in the hopes of getting knee-deep into engineering and legal/patent matters, will be disappointed. But not completely disappointed. We don't want to divulge too many design details, or legal consideration details, since we would not be "shocked! to find ourselves subject to some sort of lawsuit from you-know-who. (If you don't know who we mean, what exactly have you been reading about until now?). However, here's a small glimpse as to what the past three years have been like:
Initially, we were fortunate to have found a very creative and skilled product design firm (and mechanical and electrical engineers) which helped us to select and implement the very best possible design. In terms of the major design of the drawer system, the key tags and the method of insertion and removal, we literally developed five different designs — both for the drawer and for the key tags. Frankly, we thought that our third design was great and already had it prototyped and started showing it to customers when we discovered shortcomings in the design. That was a real blow emotionally, and our fourth design (which was our first try to work around the new issues) was not as good as we would have liked. But then came DESIGN NUMBER FIVE, which to our real delight also turned out to be the best of all the designs by far! The sun was shining for us on that day!
Of course, in a project like this there are many opportunities to get things “right” or to "miss the mark", both in major design decisions of obvious significance as well in minor tweaks and nuances that provide an opportunity to demonstrate a fanatic attention to usability detail. In each case, we thought very carefully, explored different approaches, and in many cases actually prototyped various versions. To give you a taste of how much thought we put into every aspect of the project, below is a very small sample of the types of questions we tried to answer "right":
What is the maximum key depth slot that we need our system to have to accommodate? (13/16) to building and business cycles for a property. e.g. should we implement delays or speedups in the movement of key drawers? (yes, a lot).
Should the drawer return the key to the same drawer it was originally removed from or should the system be able to suggest (yes, four of the most logical return-to drawer algorithms).
While we are very satisfied with the quality of our initial design decisions, we fully anticipate pursuing a process of continual improvement and refinement, just as you have come to expect of us regarding our BuildingLink residential management platform. On the KeyLink software end as well, we have already mapped out a path for the next two software versions, v1.2 beta, and v1.3 network.
A Final Postscript: "New" PackageTrak announcement is too little, too late
Nine years after we first began our attempts to convince KeyTrak that our and their customers wanted and were entitled to more than they were providing, the following press release has just been posted to the KeyTrak website. Rather than try to work with us to give our mutual customers a best in breed solution, KeyTrak instead chose to go it alone, and have now added some "new" functionality that brings them fully up to date with the 2002 version of BuildingLink's package tracking module. Only nine additional nodules to go and seven more years of catching up to do. A sad postscript for a company that history will credit with basically owning the US multi-family key security market before they blew it.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, KEYTRAK, INC. COLLEGE STATION, TX:
August 28, 2009
KeyTrak introduces new PackageTrak™ feature:
KeyTrak announces the release of a new package tracking feature.... PackageTrak™ gives KeyTrak users the option to track packages delivered to their property, minimizing lost, misplaced or unclaimed packages, as well as legal suits that may result. By using a variety of flexible options, KeyTrak allows managers to track packages from the moment they arrive on the property until they are picked up by the intended recipient. (The PackageTrak™ system can operate on either the KeyTrak PC or any PC using Web Plus:
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