eDomovník: one cooperative's portal that became a product

Starting point: data locked away at the property manager

Property managers run the entire administration of their buildings — payment schedules, annual statements, utility consumption, documents — in the WAM accounting system. Owners, tenants and cooperative boards could only get to that data through the manager’s office: by phone, by email, on paper. Client portals had been attempted, but they copied the data into their own databases and struggled to keep it current and protected.

In 2010 the housing cooperative BD Pragostav wanted to give its members online access to their data. Starting from analysis and strategy, [binary] built the client portal muj.pragostav — the first integration with the WAM system.

The eDomovník story has three stages: muj.pragostav as a solution for one cooperative, eDomovník as a WAM portal for any property manager, and the Aplis DMS portal as a loosely coupled extension for documents.

From one project to a product

Other property managers working with WAM had the same need. Technically, the portal could be generalised — a single installation serving any number of managers, with separate data and its own address for each. The harder question was commercial: the portal had grown out of a property manager’s need, not as the system vendor’s product, and none of the parties could take it to market alone.

So besides the technology, [binary] also designed a three-party arrangement:

• BD Pragostav is co-author and guarantor of the project — and its first user. It brings a property manager’s experience to the product.
• [binary] develops and operates the product and provides it to MIKROS as a subcontractor, including the right to continue offering it.
• MIKROS, as the vendor of the WAM system, offers eDomovník to its clients, negotiates licences with them and provides it to them as a service.

Each party does what it does best: the manager knows what clients need, the WAM vendor has relationships with property managers across the country, and [binary] stands behind the product and its technology. A framework agreement in 2014 launched live operation — within the first year, eleven cooperatives and property managers had deployed the portal.

A decision that stood the test of time

The key technical decision was made right at the start: no copies of the data. The data stays on the property manager’s servers, and after login the portal requests only what that particular person is allowed to see.

Around 2010 this was a relative innovation; today it is a common approach. Twelve years of live operation have shown that this very decision protects the product most — against inconsistent data, against complex synchronisation, and against the risk of personal data of thousands of people piling up in yet another place.

Today’s focus

What began as a tool for viewing data has gradually become a communication channel between the property manager and the people living in the buildings. Modules are added based on what managers deal with in practice — from documents from Aplis DMS (at Pragostav as the Aplis DMS portal, loosely coupled to eDomovník, right on its website) to a newsletter and bulk mailings.

Every extension has to work for all managers at once, without custom tweaks that would fragment the product. Development decisions are therefore driven by the needs of many clients, not one.

How the risks have shifted

At the beginning, the question was whether a portal without its own data could hold up at all, and whether other managers would adopt it. That has been proven — over its lifetime it has been used by sixteen housing cooperatives and property managers and tens of thousands of their clients. Today the risks lie elsewhere:

• Personal data protection. Data is not copied, each role sees only its own slice, and consents are managed directly in the portal.
• Changing regulations. GDPR and the EED (Energy Efficiency Directive) brought obligations the product has to respond to in time, for all managers at once.
• Ageing technology. A new frontend in 2019 and, in 2026, a move to new server infrastructure.
• Product continuity. A separate company gives eDomovník its own footing, separate from the rest of [binary]‘s work.

Sixteen years from brief to a standalone company

What’s next

With the move to a separate company, eDomovník Core s.r.o., and to new infrastructure, the next stage of the product begins.

Takeaways

A good product often doesn’t start out as a product, but as a solution to one client’s specific need. For it to grow, technology alone isn’t enough. It also needs a business model in which every party has its place, and decisions that still hold after years of operation.