The Fulcrum Focus

We’ve worked very hard to design Fulcrum so that it’s as easy as possible for our customers to use. In doing so, we’ve managed to “hide” a lot of the complexities around form & database design that many other platforms expose their users to. By dragging and dropping fields in our form builder, users are essentially creating a complex database without even being aware of it. Here are five important form building tips, in no particular order, that can assist new users when building their first form.

Calculation fields are powerful for form customization and used heavily by many Fulcrum users. Since their launch last year, we’ve seen adoption take off and customers are now using them in thousands of different ways.

This is part 3 in our series on spreadsheets and data visualization. In this part we’ll cover sharing and publishing to the web from Google Sheets. Be sure to also check out part 1, part 2, part 4, and part 5 of the series.

With the release of our newest feature, Data Events, our development team has been building all sorts of useful examples in our Data Events developer docs. There are more being added everyday as we find new and novel ways to use Data Events. We’ve just scratched the surface of what is capable with this feature. As users share insights into their use cases, we’ll be glad to add more field-tested examples. Here are three Data Events that you may find helpful:

Sometimes making software is like landscaping. As seasons change and time passes, different areas show signs of weathering and damage. Some overgrowth sets in and unexpected foot paths are tread. Certain areas aren’t getting enough water while others get far too much with nothing to show for it. It’s an unyielding ebb and flow of different parts vying for attention, upkeep, and enhancement. At Fulcrum, we battle with this on a daily basis. Our focus is constantly shifting from freshly shipped features to issues caused by unforeseen use cases and an endless list of other variables and gotcha-juggling scenarios. In these past few months, however, we’ve been able to focus our complete attention on pulling every weed we could from one of our Web App’s core components, the Record Editor, and reconstructing it for better usability.

Everyday, professionals throughout many industries go through the laborious task of taking forms and information collected in the field, manually entering them into a computer, and adding that field data to a spreadsheet for future processing. This data entry process can take many otherwise productive hours out of a workday, and if data is submitted with errors or omitted information, this can lead to an even larger amount of time to correct. All of this wasted time leads to unnecessary extra costs in the form of man-hours, travel time, fuel costs, & paper storage.

Today, we are proud to announce Editor, the latest iteration of Fulcrum’s web-based data viewing and editing tool. Since the early days of Fulcrum, we’ve always had a tool to view your collected data on a map, browse the data to see what’s being collected, make edits to it, and export to our many supported formats. To enable even greater flexibility in your QA and reporting processes, we needed it to do more. So we’ve fully rebuilt the Editor from the ground up with a few key focuses in mind: speed and performance, better filtering, and customizable downloads.

Engineering is the art of building things within constraints. If you have no constraints, you aren’t really doing engineering. Whether it’s cost, time, attention, tools, or materials, you’ve always got constraints to work within when building things. Here’s an excerpt describing the challenge facing the engineer:

Next week I’ll be in Raleigh for the 2016 AASHTO GIS for Transportation Symposium. The conference is an opportunity for government transportation departments, private industry, technology creators, and analysts to discuss the latest in GIS mapping for transportation and traffic purposes. We have hundreds of users with Fulcrum deployed for transportation use cases including asset management, construction monitoring, inspections, traffic studies, and more. It gives us a great chance to hear about the latest industry challenges.

Speaking at conferences is a great way to think about what you know in your industry and how you can share that information. A couple weeks ago, I was invited to speak at O’Reilly Fluent Conference in San Francisco, where I talked about web map libraries and emerging GIS technologies. Here are some few discoveries and thoughts I had about the experience.

When working with our customers, we talk a lot about pain. That is, the sorts of pain your business deals with right now that we can help resolve. We make software for business productivity, so people come to us with some form of pain, hoping that we can help them get to the bottom of it and fix their problems. We focus on understanding the root pain points of business process.

Some great new spring funding opportunities in the GIS world were just published on the Grants.gov website. We republished a few of them here, so feel free to take a look and share with your colleagues. If you know of any new opportunities you’d like to share with our readers, send us a message at info@fulcrumapp.com.

According to IFAW in their 2013 report, Criminal Nature: The Global Security Implications of the Illegal Wildlife Trade, worldwide industrial trade in illegal wildlife is estimated to be $19 billion. That”s equivalent to the price Facebook paid for WhatsApp, or nineteen times what it paid for Instagram. What makes this even more problematic to reconcile, not to mention counter is that this illegal activity is commingled within legal wildlife trade, estimated to be over $323 billion, globally. What further compounds the concerns about illegal wildlife trade is that this $19 billion supports the same bad actors over the same smuggling routes, the same logistical and finance supply chains and leveraged by other criminal organizations and terrorists to procure, transport and sell illegal narcotics, weapons, counterfeit merchandise and most disturbing, the trafficking of humans for modern slavery & prostitution. Each of these illicit activities are also multi-billion dollar global industries, interwoven into the fight against illegal wildlife trade.

Last week I attended the GIS CAMA Technologies Conference in Savannah, hosted by URISA and IAAO. The event was a meeting-of-the-minds for tax assessors, property appraisers, and the GIS / technical staff for the industry writ-large to discuss the latest in tech and trends for the assessors community.

Keeping your fleet on the road with Fulcrum
If you operate a motor pool in your line of work, you probably realize how challenging it can be to maintain good records of your vehicles. Some people use paper forms and spreadsheets but find this to be limiting and time consuming. Many companies just don’t actively manage their fleet at all, hoping that the drivers will perform maintenance when needed. If you operate a fleet of vehicles and you use Fulcrum, here is an app you may want to deploy to your staff.

You may have noticed we recently released some new features and gave the app builder side bar some organization and colors. This post outlines each of the new features and goes a little into some upcoming releases that are currently in development and testing.

Animal and plant communities are profoundly affected by climate change. During periods of warming or cooling, the first ecosystems to be effected are the ones that are located near the geographic edge of their range, for example the ‘islands’ of of spruce-fir forests that sit atop the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina. These ecosystems can act as a ‘canary in a coal mine’, an early indicator of what is to come later, on a much larger scale. The Boreal Wetlands of the Adirondack Park are such ecosystems. This vast array of bogs, fens, and other wetlands are some of the southernmost of their kind in North America. Impacts of climate change will be observed there first, and may provide clues about what changes in plant and animal communities we can expect in the future.

Jason Wheatley is the Geospatial Technologies (GIS) Manager for Century Engineering, Inc. in Hunt Valley, Maryland. He has worked in both the public and private geospatial industries since 2004. He received a B.S. in Geography, as well as a M.S. in GIS and Public Administration from Salisbury University (Salisbury, MD). The Century Geospatial Technologies Group (GIS Group) provides technology consultant services to clients within federal, state, local governments, as well as the private sector throughout the Mid-Atlantic Region.

If you have ever wanted to mirror or screen share your smartphone or tablet screen to a computer or television, this post is for you! It doesn’t matter if you are on a Windows computer or a Mac or if you are using an iPhone, iPad, Android phone or tablet, the steps for screen sharing below work on all of them, and are easy to set up. The two easiest options available are QuickTime (Mac only) or Reflector (Mac & Windows). We use both here at Fulcrum and have come to rely on them for our web demonstrations, help videos, and training.

This month in our continuing series of customer interviews, we talked with one of our long-time customers in the manufacturing industry. Manufacturing companies are a growing user base for mobile data collection applications, and Fulcrum is a great match for manufacturers because it offers an integrated mobile solution that speeds up quotes, customer service, and order management. Real-time data capture is what differentiates the leaders from the rest.

Many of our customers are using Fulcrum for different types of consulting projects, meaning they’re delivering on projects on behalf of someone else — as a subcontractor to a prime contractor, to a city or municipality, or to another government agency. I wanted to take a moment to review some of the many advantages of the Fulcrum platform for consulting engineers, business analysts, field services companies, or software developers, and give a little background on why so many choose Fulcrum as a basis for completing their projects.

One fire (or flood) away from failure
The statistics behind data loss are alarming: 70% of today’s businesses would fail within 3 weeks if they suffered a catastrophic loss of paper-based records due to fire or flood.1

QR codes are not just for company promotions and marketing anymore, businesses can use them for things like Asset Inventory, Asset Tracking, Maintenance Records and Logs & Ticketing. The Fulcrum barcode field allows users to quickly scan any type of barcode and QR code and pull up records with the scanned information. QR Codes are better in many ways over barcodes, mainly because they are faster to scan and can hold more information. Here’s how to quickly get started using Fulcrum and QR codes.

Using Photo Metadata in Fulcrum
When looking at photos, it often helps to glance at the metadata behind your photos. Accessing this information can give your photos more context. For example, how close was the captured photo to the record location? Here’s a quick tip, to access the metadata of a photo you want to click “Image Data” (top left corner) while looking at a photo. This will display a map, make/model of the capture device, device OS, Fulcrum version, dimensions, date, latitude/longitude coordinates, altitude, compass heading, and distance to the record.

As we just wrapped up a great 2016, it’s important for us to plant some flags for 2017. We’re constantly evolving and improving our platform, so clear milestones ahead of us can be both immensely helpful to guide our team toward shared goals, and also give customers insights into where we’re headed strategically with Fulcrum.

Recently, we’ve started taking the time to write some automated tests for the user interface of our Android application. The goal, as with most tests, is to prevent regressions when we push out new features and make changes to the app. There’s quite a few frameworks you can use, and we’ve made good progress using Espresso. There have been some hurdles though; one of the biggest bumps was figuring out a way our tests could work with the new permissions model on Android Marshmallow.

As we wrap up another exciting year, we’d like to take a moment to recap and review some of our highlights over the past 12 months. When we closed out 2014, I anticipated this was going to be an exciting year, but could never have predicted just how much we could have accomplished!

Time Visualizations
One of the many interesting analytical possibilities with data captured in Fulcrum comes from the temporal nature of everything collected by teams in the field over time. Because all data captured in Fulcrum automatically records timestamp information when created or updated, this data could then be plotted to see collection patterns through the course of your projects, to see spatial distribution and the ebb and flow of data capture.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming ever more commonplace in the mapping business for collecting cheap aerial imagery on demand. Once an expensive hobby for tinkerers, UAVs have rapidly become a truly disruptive technology in the geospatial industry. The ability to quickly send an inexpensive and nimble platform of sensors into the air to survey your surroundings, and receive realtime feedback, has opened the door to countless opportunities for data collection and analytics.

The holiday countdown has begun! We understand that finding gifts for map geeks can be quite tricky. So, the Fulcrum team has compiled a list of the top cartography gifts that your map geek is sure to love. Ranging from $15 to $1,500, we hope you can find something within your price range that will be treasured for years to come.

Fulcrum for field biologists
For field biologists, collecting data in the field is just another day at work. Traditionally, most field biologists carry around notepads or clipboards to take notes, document habitats, and make measurements. In addition, they need to carry cameras and GPS devices for taking photos and videos of flora and fauna in the wild, and plotting these locations.

Recently I joined the board of the Homeowners Association in my neighborhood and discovered what many others have discovered about their HOA: a lot of frustration around management of the community and the lack of support the residents receive from the board. According to the Community Associations Institute trade association, it is estimated that HOAs govern 24.8 million American homes and 62 million residents. This leaves about twenty percent of Americans living in a community managed by an HOA.

The first in our series of customer spotlights, Blaine Hackett is the Director of Business Development, GIS for RESPEC. Blaine has been working with Geographic Information Systems since 1990. He received his B.S. in Geography from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and Masters of Geographic Information Science from the University of Minnesota. He has worked in diversified GIS environments including state and local government, consulting engineering and planning, non-profit and Fortune 500 companies.

We’re excited to be attending the excellent Geography 2050 Symposium this week in New York City. Set up as an open symposium by the American Geographical Society, the objective is to offer a platform for discussion around the challenges facing planet, with a focus on mapping, geography, and spatial sciences. After an excellent show last year, this year’s focus is “Exploring Our Future in an Urbanized World”, with a set of topics relating to urbanization and the growth of cities.

On October 8th, I had the privilege of presenting at the annual JS.Geo conference. The event was held in Philadelphia this year and Fulcrum was proud to join the impressive list of sponsors. This inexpensive, one day conference on all things Geo and JavaScript provides a refreshing alternative to the traditional conference format. You can review the #jsgeo hashtag to follow attendee reactions on Twitter and check out the speaker slides here.

too

In order to view your data on the map on the Fulcrum mobile apps or on the web, you’ll need to have some spatial component to it. To do this you can import a shapefile or a CSV file with latitude and longitude columns.

Earlier this year we launched calculation fields, and we’re constantly impressed with the ways our customers are using them to add value to their field surveys. I want to demo a neat technique you can use to embed proj4js into a calculation field to gain access to custom GIS projections.

A while back we launched integration with Zapier, a service that allows you to connect web services together for things like push notifications, emails, and data automation.

Geography 2050 is a symposium to gather the brightest thinkers that live and breathe geography, either as a core business or a peripheral part of their core expertise, and discuss the potential markets, changes, and potential for where we’ll be in the field of geography by the year 2050.

What a week! Last week was the fourth annual Denver Startup Week. Denver has a thriving entrepreneurial community and is quickly becoming one of the best places in the U.S. to start, build and operate a business. #DENstartupweek showed me how strong the community of tech, marketing and startups are in my city.

As most developers are probably aware, Google’s new update to the Android platform has officially been released! Android 6.0 Marshmallow will start rolling out to devices next week, with the Nexus devices getting the update first. So in the meantime, what is the new “Runtime Permissions” feature in Marshmallow?

Next week Bryan and I will be attending the International Construction and Utility Equipment Expo (ICUEE) in Louisville, KY. We’ll be spending all three days (9/29 – 10/1) showcasing how Fulcrum can be deployed for field environments to increase productivity, workflow, and data quality.

How do you choose which navigation app to use? For me, I compare the strengths of the leading navigation apps available. There are a plethora of options in each app store to choose from, but I focused on the three apps that maintain the best data sources available. This means the data they use is reliable and maintained on a global scale. The three turn-by-turn navigation apps below provide users with a free mobile app, as well as access to edit the data behind the map.

Nearly every one of our users is a business customer, and the data resident on their mobile devices is protected company property. We take security very seriously, and want all of our users to have the tools at their disposal to keep their work safe. The objective of this article is to shed light on a few techniques available already on your iOS and Android devices to help protect your data that’s floating out in the world with your staff as they’re using mobile devices in the field.

Having your up-to-date Fulcrum data available in your own database enables countless opportunities for custom integrations and seamless workflows. Databases power most CRM, GIS, and Asset Management systems, so configuring Fulcrum to write directly to these database tables allows you to leverage all the benefits of Fulcrum for field data collection without having to modify your existing systems or workflows.

Many of our users have advanced data collection requirements, with multiple items potentially connected to one another with parent-child relationships, extensive pre-populated lists, or imported records from external sources like asset management databases.

After you have collected excellent data in Fulcrum, how do you go about styling and embedding that data online or on your company’s website?

These days we all have far more accounts and passwords than we know what to do with. Managing a set of over 100 unique usernames and passwords for online services like banking, productivity, hosting, social media is becoming untenable even for casual Internet citizens. As a high-octane user of web services, I have over 500 unique accounts for different things, hundreds of which I rarely use, but occasionally need. This combined with the risk of having an account compromised with sensitive information make the need for a hyper secure password strategy for any online accounts. The trouble is that to be truly secure, you should use strong passwords, vary them from site to site, and reset or update them from time to time.

In a couple of weeks we’ll be out at the American Public Works Association 2015 annual conference in Phoenix, AZ. Hundreds of organizations around the country use Fulcrum for public works field data collection in water management, transportation signage, safety audits, asset inventory, construction site management, and more.