Moving a portfolio off physical keys is mostly a scheduling project with hardware attached. The controllers, readers, and locks are the easy part. The hard part is doing 10 to 40 doors across several buildings without a tenant standing outside a locked door at 6 a.m. wondering why their key stopped working. Here is the order we run a cutover in to keep that from happening.
Survey every door before you buy anything
The first mistake is ordering hardware off a door count. A door count tells you how many openings you have. It does not tell you what each one needs. Before we quote a portfolio, we walk every opening and record the door type, the existing lock, whether it is fire-rated, which way it swings, whether there is power nearby, and how the door is used. A glass storefront entry, a hollow-metal stairwell door, and an interior office door are three different installs, even though each is one line on a spreadsheet.
The survey is also where you decide which doors get a reader at all. Not every opening needs cloud access on day one. Main entries, after-hours entries, and shared amenity doors usually do. A rarely used side door might just get a better lock. Sorting this out on the survey keeps the budget honest and shrinks the cutover.
Match the hardware to the door
Cloud access platforms are mostly about the software. What holds the door is the same electrified hardware the trade has used for years: electric strikes, maglocks, motorized mortise locks, or wireless lock sets. Which one fits depends on the door you surveyed.
Fire-rated doors are where people get in trouble. A fire door has to positively latch, so a maglock that holds it shut without a latch is generally not acceptable on its own. Any electrified hardware on a rated door has to be listed for that use, and drilling a rated door in the field can void its label. Egress is the other constraint. Building and fire codes require that people can get out without a key, card, app, or special knowledge, which limits what goes on the inside of the door. We work these details against local fire and building code before anything gets mounted, because a reader that fails inspection has to come back off the door.
Migrate credentials in parallel, cut over in one move
The safest cutover is one where the new system is fully built and tested while the old keys still work. Readers mounted, controllers online, everything talking to the cloud, and every tenant enrolled with a credential in hand, all before you retire a single key.
Credential migration is its own task. You have to collect who needs access to what, choose between fobs, cards, and phone credentials, enroll everyone, and get the credential into their hands before the switch. Phone credentials save you from handing out plastic, but not every tenant will want the app, so plan on a mix. Let people test their new credential on a door while the old key is still their fallback. When enrollment is done and tested, flip that door group over and rekey or retire the old cylinders. A tenant's first real use of the new system should not also be their first time holding the credential.
The one that gets missed: back-of-house
Front entrances get the attention. The doors that cause the emergency call are the ones nobody put on the list: the service entry the cleaning crew uses at night, the loading door the delivery driver props open, the mechanical room the HVAC contractor needs, the trash enclosure gate. These get missed because they belong to vendors, not tenants, so they are not on the tenant roster.
Walk the building as a vendor, not as a manager. Who comes in after hours, and through which door? Those openings either need a credential path or they become the propped-open door that undoes the system. Deciding how vendors get in, and on what schedule, is part of the cutover.
Sequence the buildings, not just the doors
Across a portfolio you do not cut everything over in one night. Do one building or one door group at a time, confirm it is stable, then move to the next. Schedule each switch for that building's lowest-traffic window, which is rarely the same hour for an office building and a retail center. Keep a written rollback for each group. If a controller misbehaves, you want to put that one door group back on keys for a night without unwinding the whole portfolio.
Who we are
West Texas Wi-Fi & Networking is a veteran-owned contractor in Lubbock. We design and install commercial Wi-Fi, cameras, access control, and cabling across West Texas, and we hold a Texas Department of Public Safety security license (B31108601) for the camera and access control work. If you want a second set of eyes on your building, book a free site survey or call (806) 370-9434.