Access Control in Duluth, for clinics, office parks and suites.

Duluth has a lot of medical and professional offices: clinics and practices in the office buildings around the hospital campus on Duluth Highway and along Sugarloaf Parkway, and suites in the low-rise parks near Gwinnett Place. A practice like that has a waiting room the public walks into, and behind it rooms and a back door that only staff should open. Access control draws that line: the front door on a schedule, open during office hours and locked after, and the doors behind reception on a reader that only staff credentials open.

The records room and the medication room are the doors people ask about most, because the practice needs to know who opened them. A reader on those doors keeps a log of every entry by name and time, which a key never could. Where a suite shares a building entrance with other tenants, the building's door stays on the landlord's arrangement and the suite's own doors get theirs.

Office parks off Sugarloaf Parkway and Satellite Boulevard tend to be single-tenant buildings with a lobby door, a side door and a door to the parking lot that staff prefer. We look at which doors people actually use before we quote, because controlling the door nobody uses and leaving the one everybody props open is the most common mistake we see.