An occupant experience platform replaces none of your systems: it builds on them. That is what makes the subject simple in principle, and demanding at the interfaces.
The most common misunderstanding early in a project is to see an occupant experience platform as a new system to deploy, competing with the access control or the CMMS already in place. It is the opposite.
It aggregates: it reads from and writes to systems that remain the owners of their data, and presents the occupant with a single interface. Access control remains the system of record for permissions. The CMMS remains the system of record for work orders. The HRIS remains the system of record for people. The platform does not replace these systems; it orchestrates them.
The practical consequence: the project is judged not on the platform’s features, but on the quality of its interfaces with what you already have.
This is the starting point. Without federated authentication you create a parallel identity store, and it will drift. The platform must authenticate with your identity provider, inherit its groups, and above all propagate leavers automatically. Someone disabled in the directory must lose their access with no manual step.
The interface covers credential issuance and revocation, reading permissions by zone, and synchronizing temporary populations. The thing to watch is latency: a revocation must take effect in real time, not at the next sync cycle. Check too that the interface is bidirectional — plenty of connectors can read but not write.
It feeds user joiners, leavers and transfers. It is what allows access to exist before day one and to disappear on the day someone leaves. Without that link the process stays manual and the discrepancies accumulate.
These two words cover different needs that are often conflated. Multi-site : one organization, several buildings, with rules and services that differ from site to site. Multi-tenant : several organizations in the same building, sharing certain services — reception, catering, parking — without ever seeing each other’s data.
The second case is the more demanding, and it is the landlords’ case. Separation must be structural, not an application-level filter: each tenant administers its own permissions, and the operator keeps a view of the common areas without accessing occupant data.
Before any demo: “which connectors already exist for my systems, in production, at other clients?” A connector announced on a roadmap is not an available connector. The difference between what exists today and what is planned for tomorrow can turn a three-month rollout into an eighteen-month project.
Thirty minutes, starting from your real situation. No generic deck.