Custom Cisco BBSM development against the property management system for Rosen Hotels in Orlando, subcontracted through Digital Fusion and Millennium Technology. The work was in the BBSM software development kit and its SQL schema rather than in its configuration screens.
The flow carried the whole guest transaction: guest room validation, account validation, payment selection across credit card, room charge and negotiated special rates, third-party card processing, authorization of the guest’s own device, and the posting of charges back into the PMS — with the disconnect side capturing the device MAC address and closing out the billing record.
The two requirements that shaped it
Port hopping. A guest moving between the wired room port and the wireless network had to hold one session rather than pay twice. Anything else is a billing dispute waiting at the front desk.
Cross-property sharing. Group rates and discounts negotiated with the PMS at one property had to be honored at another. That is the requirement that turns a per-hotel billing system into an estate-wide one, and it is the one that makes the schema work hard.
A development environment was built to match — a BBSM test server, an SDK and Visual Studio workstation, and BBSM 5.2 under VMware — and the design was taken to Cisco’s own BBSM development team.
How it closed
I recommended the customer wait for the manufacturer’s next release rather than buy the development from us.
Cisco’s BBSM 5.3 was arriving with much of what the property needed already built in. The partner holding the engagement wanted the custom work to continue regardless. I put the recommendation to the customer anyway, they took it on my say-so, and I prepared the handover and transitioned the project rather than letting it drift.
The stop conditions were in the scope of work from the outset, naming in advance the two circumstances that would halt the engagement: the customer’s confidence in the progress being made, and the engineer’s own judgment that the development had gone beyond their experience. Putting that second one in writing before the money starts is the cheapest insurance a professional services engagement can carry, and almost nobody does it.