The Fulcrum Product Development team has been focusing for the past few months on improving usability across the platform by updating some outdated workflows, modernizing platform components, and building out growth capacity. We’ve also been hard at work on some exciting new features, which we know our users are going to absolutely love!
Below is a brief summary outlining what we’ve been working on lately as well as a sneak peek at some of the newer features we expect to ship in the coming weeks and months.
What’s New
Improved Code Editor
We completely overhauled the Fulcrum code editor, which is now powered by Microsoft’s open source Monaco Editor. This update makes writing and debugging custom data event and calculation code directly within the app much more pleasant, by exposing built-in functions with intellisense suggestions and autocomplete functionality.
Membership Management Improvements
We listened to user feedback and improved the membership management experience by including additional information in the members table, making it easier to sort, filter, and export for additional analysis. We also redesigned the permissioning workflow, with a focus on reducing the number of steps required to find, select, and modify access to Apps, Projects, and Layers.
Data Download Enhancements
When we overhauled our Record Editor a couple of years ago, we introduced a new way to quickly download a subset of your app’s records. These downloads leverage our lightning-fast Query API, but until recently were limited to just downloading records — so while the downloader was fast, it was also limited in functionality, compared to our legacy exporter. We’re happy to announce that we finally addressed this gap and made it easy to download a subset of records with their associated photos, signatures, and audio files! We’ve also added some new options for media and record link fields, to let you specify whether the values should be logical (media file URL, linked record title) or relational (file / record ID). While file URLs and record link titles are easier to use directly, record IDs are useful for joining objects relationally in a database.
Platform Updates
We implemented some major behind-the-scenes infrastructure improvements to support continued growth, performance and stability across the platform. The Fulcrum brand received a fresh new look with a new logo and website, we launched interactive product tours and feature highlights and implemented a new system for tracking feature requests and user input.
What’s on the Horizon
Global Navigation
We’re working on modernizing site navigation in the web app by introducing a global navigation sidebar, which will make navigating around the application much more intuitive and seamless. This will allow us to better expose some links which are currently buried within individual pages, requiring fewer clicks and boosting productivity. This redesign will also provide us with the extra space needed for the new features we’re building!
Saved Views
While improving Record Editor downloads, we decided it was finally time to let users save their column setup, filter, sort, and map view settings as a “saved view” that can easily be retrieved for future access. You’ll soon be able to save multiple views to quickly jump between common subsets of your data. For example, let’s say you have a consistent operational need to review/download “All records updated in the previous 7 days with a status of needs review.” You’ll be able to set up a custom filter using a combination of fields (status, updated at, etc.), sort by timestamp, hide some nonessential fields, and save a view called “Weekly Review” for easy access, at any time, without having to recreate all your settings.
Mobile Filter Improvements
We couldn’t add a ton of new usability improvements to the web app without also bringing some mobile goodness! We’re working on some massive improvements to mobile filtering, including the ability to filter on your form fields. These custom mobile filters will operate very similarly to how custom filters currently work in the web app. You’ll be able to build out filter rules by selecting a field, operator, and value(s) and multiple filter rules can be combined with standard filter elements, including Projects, Status, and Users – making it easier to drill down to just the records you need to see. These enhancements should really help improve productivity in the field by providing an ad hoc way to generate a list of daily work, high priority inspections, or other scoped views.
We’re really excited about Fulcrum’s enhancements and can’t wait to ship the next round of features! If you’re interested in getting started with Fulcrum, you can start a free trial or request a demo to get an in-depth look.