GSS Developer Kit

For Lodging Link® Guest Service System Manufacturers

Comtrol’s Hospitality Products Division provides the industry’s ONLY universal protocol translation system for connecting Property Management Systems with hundreds of Guest Service Systems (GSSs), including PBX, call accounting, voice mail, keyless entry, in-room movies, internet access, mini-bar, point-of-sale, and energy management. Comtrol’s Lodging Link™, the premier universal interface for the hospitality industry, was developed to help hotel technology providers meet their integration challenges. Through a powerful interface "engine," Lodging Link provides seamless, bi-directional communication between multiple hospitality systems and the property management system.

The GSS Developer Kit enables GSS manufacturers to develop directly to Comtrol’s Lodging Link PMS interface hub. This gives GSS manufacturers the capability to eliminate the cost and effort of designing, developing, testing, and deploying their own communications protocols. It also ensures that the manufacturers’ GSS devices are immediately compliant with all Lodging Link-based Property Management Systems in the marketplace.

One Interface Delivers Compatibility To Many PMS Vendors’ Products

Write One "Universal" Interface and Become Instantly Compatible to Many PMS Vendors’ Products. Incompatibility between PMS software and a Guest Service System may be the only thing preventing a PMS vendor from using your product in their solution. That’s why Comtrol introduced the GSS Developers Program, which enables you to write a single, “universal” interface and eliminate incompatibility issues. Using our kit to write a universal interface offers the following advantages:

• Speeds new hotel product time-to-market
• Provides a robust set of data options for interfacing
• Enables you to write only one interface, instead of multiple
• Enables connectivity to all PMS systems
• Provides tools and support necessary to complete interface
• Reduces development costs associated with PMS integration of your system’s proprietary interface.

What’s Included in the Developer Kit?

The GSS Software Development Kit consists of the following components:

• Communication Specification – Includes an established robust set of data point options for interfacing a PMS through Lodging Link.
• Development Overview for GSS Developers – This document contains basic information to assist in getting the GSS device interface developer familiar with developing a Lodging Link interface.
• Common Scripting Interface (CSI) application – This Windows application is used during development to test communications connections supported by Lodging Link and scripted message transactions between GSS devices and the PMS.
• CSI Supporting documentation:
  • CSI Users Guide
  • CSI Scripting Guide to writing scripts for the CSI application
  • Sample scripts to show how to do common scripting tasks
• Access to our on-line Developer site – includes all the latest software, documentation and updates.