The Front Desk Problem Most Offices Haven’t Solved
Any discussion about workplace safety generally begins and ends with firewalls. But this is not the case when it comes to most exposure. This exposure occurs where you would least expect it, the front desk. An un-screened visitor, a contractor who has not signed an NDA, and discarded paper sign-in sheet.
This is one of the reasons why many businesses are looking to reevaluate their office tools. Archie has established itself as a reliable desk booking and co-working space management tool, and it works great when all you want is to manage a shared work environment. However, as soon as compliance monitoring, contractor management, or mandatory check-ins come into play, its limitations become apparent, since this wasn’t its purpose.
What Businesses Are Actually Looking For
Whenever firms seek an Archie alternatives, there seem to be some common themes that emerge from their search process. For example, some firms require a better access control screening system. Some need an audit trail for their compliance with health care, financial, and governmental regulation. Some are just looking for one software that will manage everything all at once.
Several platforms have been developed that will meet these various needs. Skedda and Deskbird focus on desk scheduling, while adding visitor check-in as an add-on service; this is good for offices that want their desks booked rather than guests screened. SwipedOn and Greetly cater to smaller organizations with easy and inexpensive digital check-ins. Envoy and Eptura have sophisticated user interfaces and tight integration capabilities, but these come at a higher cost and will not be suitable for smaller companies.
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Then there is another category designed with the difficult challenges in mind: watchlist screening, identification, compliance for contractors, and robust audit trails. This is where Visitly fits in, not as an application that has been developed primarily to handle bookings but with additional visitor management capabilities added on top. It is essentially a security-oriented solution first, and a visitor management solution second.
What a Modern Visitor Management System Actually Needs to Do
The important factors are very much industry-dependent. An ITAR-compliant manufacturing plant will have security needs that differ from those of a startup that wants nothing more than to get rid of its paper log book. However, there are some common functionalities that keep popping up: pre-registration for minimizing the congestion at reception, online signing of NDAs, host notifications, and identification photos at the time of entry.
SOC 2 Type II auditing and watch list screening are usually necessities in industries that require regulation. And for companies operating many facilities, centralized management and integration with identity management platforms (SSO, SCIM) are as crucial as the check-in screen itself.
Choosing What Fits
This question doesn’t have a definite answer, it all comes down to what the business wants to resolve. For example, the requirements for the room booking at universities differ from the needs of a defense company that has to manage the entry to its facilities. The real question in this case is not “which one is better,” but “what problem do we really want to solve.”
Once that is understood, the number of viable options becomes limited very quickly. There are platforms designed to improve office efficiency, and there are others designed to keep the front door from being the weakest link. The ability to understand which one a company needs is really where the process of choosing the right visitor management system should start.
