Online facility management software means the record lives in a browser rather than on a machine in an office nobody visits. For a maintenance team that matters in one specific place: the technician standing in front of the plant. If what was done has to be written on paper and typed up later, it gets typed up late, or in batches, or not at all, and the history you are paying to keep is the thing that quietly stops being true. Everything else about running it online is a consequence of that, including the questions worth asking before you commit a building's record to somebody else's server.
The point is filing at the plant, not access from home
Remote access is the feature that gets sold, and it is not the one that changes the work. What changes the work is that the person who did the job closes it where they did it, on the phone in their pocket, with the asset already on the screen because they scanned or searched it. That is the difference between a history that reflects the building and a history that reflects somebody's memory of Friday afternoon. Judge an online product on how few taps that takes with gloves on and one bar of signal.
Offline is a real question in a plant room
Plant rooms, basements and roofs are where the work is and where the signal is not. Ask what the product does with no connection: whether it queues the update and syncs, or whether the form is simply lost. A tool that requires a live connection to file a job will train the team back into paper within a month, and no amount of dashboard makes up for a history with holes in it in exactly the places the equipment is.
Your record has to be able to leave
Putting the asset list and the history online means a third party is holding the thing that outlives your subscription. The protection is not a promise, it is an export you have tried. Take a full export during the trial, open it, and check that it contains the asset list with its condition, the work order history with dates and costs, and the preventive schedule with what is due. If what comes out is a formatted report rather than a file you can load elsewhere, treat the record as rented.
Questions people ask about online facility management software
Is online the same as cloud based?
In this category, yes. Both mean the vendor runs the software and you reach it through a browser or an app rather than installing it. The questions worth asking are the same: what happens without a connection, and what comes out when you leave.
What about a building with no site wide wifi?
Then offline behavior is the deciding feature rather than a nice extra. Test it in the worst room in the building during the trial, not in the office.
Do we still need paper checklists?
Only as a fallback. The value of the online record comes from it being the single place the answer lives; a parallel paper system means two records and two truths, which is worse than either one alone.