QQDEN

The challenge

Most residential buildings in Taiwan are run day to day by a facility management company (物業管理公司). The company provides the building manager (總幹事) and the guards, and works for the residents' management committee. One company may look after dozens of buildings.

Much of that work is still done by hand:

• Notices go on the lobby noticeboard. Residents who are away, or who just walk past it, miss them.
• Parcels and visitors are logged on paper. The guard writes down every delivery, then phones the resident or waits for them to come by.
• Feedback gets lost. Complaints and repair requests arrive by phone, in person or in a LINE group, and there's no record of what was done about them.
• Every building works differently. Each manager keeps their own spreadsheets and paper records, so the company can't see what's happening across its buildings, or move staff between them easily.

Software that claimed to automate this often just moved the same manual steps onto a screen. QQDEN was designed around the people who do the work: the company, its staff in each building, and the residents.

What we built

QQDEN is a B2B2C platform. The facility management company is the customer. It uses QQDEN to serve its own customers, the buildings it manages, and their residents.

The management portal is a web app for the company and its staff. The company registers each building, sets up its blocks, units and rules, and assigns employees to it. Administration groups decide what each person can do. Staff switch between their buildings in the same portal. From there they publish announcements, record parcels and visitors, handle feedback, manage the building's committee, contacts and documents, and set the rules for booking shared facilities.

The resident app, for iOS and Android, is free for residents. They join by an invitation sent to their phone by text message. They get real-time notifications for announcements and parcels (with a photo, if the guard took one). They can pre-register their guests, book facilities, send feedback with photos, and join discussions with their neighbours.

Door access and kiosks. QQDEN manages a building's door access system and its access logs from the cloud. A feedback kiosk in the lobby lets residents report problems on the spot, which cuts down on routine housekeeping rounds.

Self-managed buildings, which have a committee but no management company, can use QQDEN too. Their committee members do what the company's staff would.

How we built it

One platform, many companies. Every company, and every building, shares one database. Each building's records are tagged with the building, and every query is automatically limited to the buildings the user is allowed to see. A company's staff can work across all of its buildings. Residents only ever see their own building. A self-managed building is set up as its own company behind the scenes, so the same rules apply.

Real-time updates over one connection. The apps keep a single WebSocket connection open to the server. Announcements, parcels and chat messages all share that connection, each in its own stream. When a resident isn't connected, the same message is sent as a push notification to each of their devices instead.

Fast, offline-friendly apps. The resident app keeps a local copy of the data it needs, and asks the server only for what has changed since it last synced. So it opens quickly, works on a poor connection, and uses little mobile data.

Door access without exposing the building. Door controllers sit on the building's own network and mustn't be reachable from the internet. Many older controllers can't connect to it anyway. Sentry, a small Windows service installed on site, connects out to QQDEN and passes on card and reader changes and access logs. No ports are ever opened in the building's firewall.

An open API. Third-party devices and services connect through a token-based API and a plugin framework, so a company can add the hardware it already uses.

Simple sign-in, two languages. Residents sign in with their phone number, which is verified by text message. The apps and the portal are in Traditional Chinese and English. The whole system runs in Docker containers, with HTTPS certificates renewed automatically.

Where it is now

QQDEN started in 2013 in a 21-unit Taipei building that was run by its own residents. It was rebuilt from scratch at the end of 2021, and has been improved in hundreds of releases since.

It is now being prepared for its first pilots with facility management companies in Taiwan. The features are being tuned to how those companies work: one portal for all their buildings, and one app for each building's residents.