The Fulcrum Focus

We’ve been hard at work the last few months creating an amazing new capability for field survey in Fulcrum using video capture, on both Android and iOS platforms, and now we’re announcing a new feature!

API Date Filters
Our API is a core piece of the service that allows organizations to extend Fulcrum to suit their particular needs. To keep increasing the value and power of the API, we make it a priority to listen to suggestions from our users that make it easier for them to interact with their data.

With the recent release of Fulcrum data shares, we’ve opened up new capability to consume and view data collected in the field in systems outside of Fulcrum, including GIS tools, custom scripts, spreadsheets, or web maps, without the need to manually export content from your account.

Many of Fulcrum’s users are in the field collecting data which later needs to be shared with various stakeholders, like clients, government agencies, or management team members. Today we’re releasing a feature that makes this process even easier. Data Shares allow you to generate simple URLs for downloading or accessing data within your Fulcrum Apps that you can publish or share.

This week is the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, one of the largest geographic sciences organizations in the world, with members from the academic and scientific communities, business, and government from over 60 countries. AAG’s annual meeting has been held every year since the Association’s inception in 1904, providing a platform for members to discuss the latest in geographic and cartographic research and GIScience.

Patrick and I just returned from a week in Tunisia at the GCT 2014 Conference, meeting with regional GIS organizations and companies working with mapping all over continental Africa. We met with dozens of people focused on many different aspects of geospatial technology – from aerial imagery and remote sensing to surveying and incident reporting from the field. The industries of focus ran the gamut with heavy interest in electric, gas, water utilities, rail and transportation, law enforcement, tax assessment, and more.

This is a guest post from Mitchell Sipus, interdisciplinary Community Planner specialized in designing creative solutions for the world’s most complex environments.

We just released an update to add several new tools for visualizing data in the Fulcrum web interface. Layers, which includes what was previously referred to as maps, will greatly enhance the data review experience through the Fulcrum web app. We also added a few tools to make finding locations in the web app easier and faster.

As a follow-up to Last week’s announcement regarding the addition of layers functionality, today I want to walk through using offline map layers in the Fulcrum web app. Utilizing offline map layers in the web app allows the user to review data in the same manner as the data was collected.

In the latest release of QGIS (2.2 “Valmiera”), the free and open source desktop GIS software, there’s a great new feature to support one-to-many data relationships. Since we recently launched parent-child & repeatable records in Fulcrum, we wanted to write up a quick overview on how you can use QGIS with data collected in Fulcrum to do visualization and analysis for free on the desktop. Read on to learn how to create data relationships and do more using your data in a GIS.

One of the best places to go for exploring the data collection possibilities of Fulcrum is our App Gallery, which includes many pre-built app templates for different types of field surveys, across dozens of industry sectors. Today I’ll be discussing three of our latest featured additions to the gallery catalog to demonstrate the flexibility of Fulcrum to meet a wide variety of requirements: traffic sign inventory, erosion control monitoring, and construction safety.

The latest Fulcrum mobile updates include some great new features, which should help to make your fieldwork more productive. In addition to the new time fields, checklist fields, and improved validation, we’ve added a few new record actions and editing options that are worth taking a few moments to review.

With the release of our management dashboard design improvements a couple weeks ago, we also introduced a new panel for administrators monitoring activity in their Fulcrum organization, to be able to view field updates as they happens. The Activity Feed panel, visible on the right side of the main dashboard, shows a chronological view of activity going on with your users.

Languages in Fulcrum
Fulcrum has a growing user base throughout Central and South America, Africa, and Europe, and supporting users worldwide is important to providing the best data collection tool for diverse environments. In the latest update to Fulcrum for Android and iOS mobile platforms, we’ve added translations into three new languages: Spanish, French, and Portuguese.

New app-building tools
We just released an upgrade to add some nice new tools for building apps in Fulcrum. When creating digital surveys for field inspections or checklists, the data types you use to create your data collection apps are key to data integrity, as well as speed and efficiency while working in the field. This new update adds two new field types to the App Designer: a time selector field and a checklist field, for quick “Yes/No” style questions. We’ve also added a much-requested ability to do range validation on numeric field types (e.g. “value should be between 1 and 10”).

You may have heard more about stormwater recently than you’ve ever heard about it before. Stormwater has been in the news quite a bit – particularly in the region of the Chesapeake Bay – because of tighter government regulations, new fees, and because stormwater is one of the largest sources of pollution in the Bay and its contributing waterways. Stormwater runoff picks up oils, sediment, and litter from impervious surfaces (such as parking lots) every time it rains. If this pollution isn’t captured by stormwater management infrastructure (and much of it is not) it makes its way into the Chesapeake Bay.

I was recently invited to give a guest lecture presentation on Mobile Data Collection for a ‘GIS In the Sciences’ course at Rensellaer Polytechnic University in Troy, NY. This course introduces upperclassmen from various majors to the fundamentals of Geographic Information Systems. My presentation was about 5 weeks into the course, so the students already had a pretty good grasp of the basics and were becoming familiar with using QGIS to display, edit, and analyze their geospatial data.

Before joining the Spatial Networks team, I spent the last six and a half years working as a GIS Analyst/Developer for a full service engineering firm on projects spanning the globe. One of the cool things about working in the Technology Solutions group for a multidisciplinary engineering firm is that you get to be involved in a wide variety of projects across many different disciplines. Engineers are involved in everything, from transportation projects to environmental impact assessments, utility network design to water and wastewater system modeling. In my experience, this level of variety in a GIS job is rare.

With the recent release of parent-child data relationships in apps using Fulcrum’s new Repeatable sections, even further possibilities have opened up for creating more advanced survey forms. An additional feature we added here is the ability to store location data for each child item independent of the parent record. The use cases for this are many.

CARTO is a fantastic service that provides intuitive, web-based tools for GIS and mapping. Like Fulcrum, CARTO harnesses the power of PostGIS for spatial data processing. Where Fulcrum excels at mobile data collection and management, CARTO excels at dynamic data visualization and mapping. We’ve just published a CARTO webhooks guide on how you can use Fulcrum webhooks for collecting and updating your data in the field and displaying it in realtime using CARTO.

At last – interactive offline maps in Fulcrum
Offline maps in Fulcrum just got a whole lot more interactive! While the new support for one-to-many relationships has been getting a lot of attention, the latest mobile builds also quietly included a slick enhancement that allows for feature interaction within offline maps.

With the addition of repeatable fields, which enable the collection of parent-child relational data, we have also added ways for you to access and visualize both data types through the Fulcrum data management website. The regular data view is still available and will allow you to view and modify records as before, however, we have enhanced the data view for apps using repeatable fields to make the child record data accessible as well. In addition, through the record editor on the Fulcrum dashboard, you are able to view, collect, and modify child records. Finally, because child records can have unique locations themselves, independent of the parent, map views are also available for child records.

As part of yesterday’s update to support complex relationships between data types in Fulcrum, we also added another new powerful capability that makes offline fieldwork even easier for teams.

Today we’re announcing some major new features in Fulcrum. First, we’ve added a new repeatable field type that enables parent-child (i.e. one-to-many) items within records. A long-requested feature from many of our users, this new capability will enable you to create much more advanced data collection surveys and inspection forms, produce higher-quality data & geodatabases, and streamline the collection process to save time and reduce error from the field. Along with the addition of repeatable data types, we’ve improved the data exporter to support several additional formats, created a brand new advanced data importer, and released major updates to the Android and iOS apps. Together, these new features add significant power to the Fulcrum platform for doing field work. Here’s an overview of each new addition.

We on the Fulcrum team work hard to make collecting your data a breeze. And we’re always thinking of ways to make Fulcrum more valuable and powerful for you, our customers. To that end, we are pleased to announce the release of webhooks for Fulcrum.

Keep track of changes with full version history
In addition to yesterday’s announced data management improvements with the launch of full-text data searching and filtering of content, we’ve also included another powerful capability for managing field service work: data versioning.

One of the most powerful features available in Fulcrum for managing field data collection operations is our administrative data dashboard on the web, where administrators or managers can login, create or edit their apps for deployment, and also manage data that’s inbound from the field.

Over the last few months, we’ve been working hard to bring Fulcrum for iOS to the next level, making data collection even faster and more powerful. The app has been rebuilt from the ground up with tons of features and improvements all around, as well as a whole new refreshed look and feel. Announcing Fulcrum 2.0!

Previously on the blog, we’ve discussed the concept of field reports and groundtruthing on top of raster data (like satellite imagery), and the simplicity of accomplishing this in Fulcrum. Using Fulcrum’s native support for MBTiles-based map tile packs, any raster can be turned into a portable tilecache you can load onto mobile devices in Fulcrum, allowing you to annotate on top of the map using custom-designed forms.

Earlier this year, Applied Geographics (AppGeo) and Spatial Focus embarked on a 3 month pilot phase of an address reference system project on St. Croix, St. John, and St. Thomas – the three main islands of the U.S. Virgin Island Territory – for the Office of Lieutenant Governor Gregory R. Francis. 1500 of roughly 120,000 addresses covering the three islands were assigned during the pilot phase. The field crew was faced with having to develop easy procedures that would support a small local team who had limited experience with GIS technology and even more limited access to communication technology. This part of the story took place during the latter part of the pilot project (late May-June 2013), in the second and third pilot study areas in Cruz Bay, St. John and Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas. The Fulcrum app was incorporated into the field data collection process making it possible to develop, deploy, implement and maintain mobile applications quickly and easily.

Showing image metadata
Back in July, we added a small but very useful detail to how photos are displayed in the Fulcrum web app; all EXIF data can be shown while viewing a photo. This geotagging information includes device make/model, software, photo dimensions, date, altitude, direction, latitude/longitude, and even distance to record.

To recap, a couple of weeks ago we attended the Central Florida GIS Workshop in Orlando, a regional event bringing together GIS staff from many Florida city and county agencies, as well as those from consultancies and mapping companies. There was a great lineup of talks and presentations highlighting many local Florida projects.

Modern Civil Engineering should include technology! An increasingly rapidly changing digital world demands a furious pace of innovation in our engineering environment. SMEC, or Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation, is one of the leading engineering and development consultancies in the world. Providing multidisciplinary consulting services in engineering, project management, environmental science and development activities, SMEC has been engaged in assignments throughout the world for over 40 years.

While Fulcrum photo fields make attaching pictures to records a ‘snap’, the flexibility of having a single field for multiple photos can be somewhat challenging when dealing with exports. In this short blog post I will describe a few techniques I have found for managing this one-to-many relationship challenge.

One of the coolest features in Fulcrum is building offline map layers for mobile mapping. Access to a local map tile cache untethers you from the need for network connectivity to get reference map data when in the field. Using the map design software TileMill, along with some geo data or imagery, you can make your own custom map layers to load onto mobile devices for your Fulcrum field teams. In this post, I’ll walk through using some free and open resources to get your own satellite or aerial photo data, build some offline map tilesets, and load them onto your mobile devices for field use.

We just completed a substantial upgrade to the Fulcrum web platform, making our hosted service even better for our ever-growing global user base. Fulcrum data is now replicated in real time to multiple datacenters in separate geographic regions, increasing redundancy and making data even more safe and secure. As your teams are syncing up data from the field with customized data collection apps, all data is now streamed to several database servers simultaneously. We know how expensive field operations can be, so this level of data safety adds tremendous value to make sure you get the most out of your workforce. Mirrored cloud servers, along with complete data backups guarantee the safety of your valuable collected data.

In our previous post, we talked about our experience this round at JIFX, the experimental event series organized several times a year by the Naval Postgraduate School to bring industry, academia, and government together in a field testing environment out at Camp Roberts, CA. The structure of the JIFX series is unique in its ability to put different technologies (and the engineers that build them) in the field together to simulate field conditions, and to collaborate with one another. Demonstrating success (or failure!) in collaboration and integration is critical for stakeholders to see things in action, plus it allows the engineers to test the limits of their software, hardware, or systems to see what works and what doesn’t. As an engineer and designer of Fulcrum, this collaborative space is incredible to see the tool out in the field, allowing us to relentlessly improve Fulcrum’s capability as a powerful field data collection platform.

We are back in the office following a great week in California for our second experience at Camp Roberts for Joint Interagency Field Exploration (JIFX).

Many organizations using Fulcrum have requested to ability to have more control over how members can interact with both the web and mobile applications. When we recently reorganized the management and administration portions of the Fulcrum web app, we also added the ability to create custom member roles to do just that.

This Friday, Alex and I will be headed to Fort Worth, TX for the 78th Annual National Association of Counties (NACo) Conference and Exposition. We will be exhibiting in booth 728, so if you’re attending, be sure to stop by!

Digital PDF templates
A couple of weeks ago, we showcased Fulcrum’s report-generation capability, enabling users to generate printable, shareable PDF reports either from their desk or from mobile devices in the field. All of the advantages of digital field data collection can be maintained, while still affording organizations the ability to do things like print waybills for proof-of-delivery, leave printed documents with a landlord after a building inspection, or share a PDF copy of a disaster shelter assessment report with a team of decision makers.

Last month, FEMA Blue 1 attended a 2013 Joint Interagency Field Exercise (JIFX) hosted by the Naval Postgraduate School in Camp Roberts, California. NPS conducts a biannual RELIEF conference that fosters innovation and cooperation toward disaster response and is attended by representatives from academia; private industry; state, local, and federal government; non-profits; and international organizations.

Connecting people to safe drinking water in Liberia with Fulcrum
Having recently used Fulcrum to map over 15,000 potential new customers of the water utility in Liberia’s capital Monrovia, the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program is now using the collected data to help connect more people to safe drinking water, and is working on using Fulcrum to improve the customer database of the Liberia Water and Sewerage Corporation (LWSC).

Generating reports from anywhere
A couple of months back, we added a feature to the Fulcrum platform that allows you to generate reports from records captured in the field. Using your custom apps created with the Fulcrum app designer in your web account, after collecting data in the field, you can generate a PDF-based report from a record right from the mobile device. Reports can be emailed or printed right on the spot, on the go, whether they’re inspections, asset reports, or door-to-door questionnaire survey results.

We recently rolled out several major enhancements to the data view on the web. Among the enhancements are a new improved table view, a split table/map view, and a new record editing interface. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback about improving quality assurance (QA) workflows on the web, and this is the first major step to help you understand, verify, and correct your data as it’s being collected.

Last week, Tony and I spent the week out at Camp Roberts in California, testing Fulcrum in the field with FEMA for disaster relief needs as part of the RELIEF field experiments.

Fulcrum has enjoyed considerable growth in the past six months and we’re excited about that, considering that we are just getting started and many more innovative features are on the roadmap for 2013 and beyond. What we didn’t anticipate or predict a year ago was the growth of our international user base, especially on the Android OS. A large majority of our current user base resides outside of the United States and English is not their first or even second language, and in some cases, English is not spoken or understood at all. We recognized this at the outset when we started creating Fulcrum in the cloud for a global audience, we needed to enable any language on any device, based on user-driven requirements and we needed to make it simple, elegant and effective.

Humanitarian aid and assistance agencies are working all over the world to help developing nations prepare for and respond to disasters. We are proud to share that Fulcrum is actively being used by such organizations.

When we released the first generation of Fulcrum for Android nearly a year ago, we had no idea that it would quickly become the primary platform for our users. It became clear that our Android client needed to be the best it could in order to enable our users to collect data easily and efficiently. Since its initial debut on July 31st of 2012, we have released 32 updates to the client, adding new features and increasing performance and stability. Today marks a big milestone in that trend.

We love hearing feedback from our users, and were very pleased to see Brandon Freeman’s excitement about Fulcrum when he reached out on Twitter. Brandon is a Civil Engineer with TREKK Design Group, and has been using Fulcrum for multiple projects.

We’re making rapid progress in all areas of developing on Fulcrum and we are excited to see the level of interest from around the world.  We’ve got potential partners wanting to develop private-label apps powered by Fulcrum as well as a growing collection of DIY users taking the power of Fulcrum in directions we had not imagined just a few months ago.  This is all very exciting.  On top of that, we’re rolling out the latest iPhone version later this month (the iOS Universal edition as well).  We’re a tad behind on Android but I’m confident it will be at parity with iOS by mid-year 2012.