The Fulcrum Focus

New Fulcrum features
Over the past year, Fulcrum has released a number of new features of interest to our growing stable of enterprise users. Features such as audit logs, photo annotations, feature request tracking, and SAML single sign-on (SSO) are user-facing updates that have addressed integration, security, and usability concerns of enterprise users.

Centralized provisioning in Fulcrum
At the start of the year we launched Fulcrum Enterprise, a plan designed for large organizations with distributed workforces, multiple site locations, and a need to centralize account management controls within IT departments.

Fourth of July in Southern California was different this year. I’m sure most were prepared to enjoy family, friends and traditional fireworks. They most likely had made their last grocery store runs and mapped out their entertainment plan, when out of nowhere the plans were literally shook up. An earthquake measuring 6.4 in magnitude shook at 10:33 a.m., causing a swift change to the Independence Day celebrations in Searles Valley and surrounding areas. In classic Cali fashion, some felt the shaking happening and kept moving afterward thinking it’s normal California stuff since they have become accustomed to experiencing these tremors.

There’s a lot more to construction work than just — well, constructing.

Today’s businesses have a ton of data available to them and decision makers need to be able to use it to solve their most pressing problems. But because the volume of data is so high and the amount of time available to analyze it is limited, it is important to be able to put cut through the noise and get down to what really matters.

If your field teams are still conducting inspections and surveys with paper and clipboards, it’s time for an upgrade.

Recently, Kurt Menke from Bird’s Eye View GIS came to Spatial Networks’ HQ office and provided us with a three-day training course on all things QGIS. While I have dabbled with QGIS in the past when attempting to assist Fulcrum users, I had never really spent a lot of time to take a deep dive into QGIS. When the opportunity arose I was eager to attend the course.

Three years ago we introduced a new feature called Data Events, which introduced exciting new capabilities for scripting custom actions within your data collection apps. The combination of data events and calculation fields provides powerful functionality for app developers to incorporate third-party libraries or write their own JavaScript code which runs within their Fulcrum app. Need to programmatically populate fields from a third-party API, validate a record’s location, or hide fields based on user role? You can probably script your app to do exactly what you need.

From 1900 to 2000, Earth’s population grew from 1.65 billion to 6.27 billion people, and is expected to top 9 billion before 2050.

As the Fulcrum Community Advocate, I had the pleasure of attending the National VOAD (Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster) Conference in Nashville, TN. It was a life-changing and definitely a life-saving experience for me.

We receive a lot of feedback every day from trial users and customers alike. So much so that it can often be rather difficult when our product team wants to construct our roadmap and make data-driven decisions on what gets built into the product next. In order for the Product Manager, of any product, to make the right decisions on feature development, he/she has to have enough data on what customers want and why they want it. Ideally, what and why feature request data would be organized so that the Product Manager can filter, sort and view exact feedback directly from users.

I just arrived back home in St. Pete after an awesome and productive week in San Diego for this year’s FOSS4G-NA conference. It’s North America’s version of the go-to event for those of us at the intersection of geospatial and open source. OSGeo and the local organizing committee hosted it at the Marina Village Conference Center in Mission Bay. Overall the event was a phenomenal week full of great content, new (and old) friends, time with customers and partners, and a chance to see what’s next in the industry.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) conducts upwards of 32,000 inspections each year, but that number is expected to rise in the near future. Earlier this month, the U.S. labor secretary said he expects jobsite inspections to increase once the new crop of OSHA agents hired in fiscal year 2018 completes training.

About Geodexy
When I joined Spatial Networks we were in the very early stages of building a data collection tool, primarily for internal use to improve speed and efficiency on data project work. That product was called Geodexy, and the model was similar to Fulcrum in concept, but in execution and tech stack, everything was completely different.

As we speed toward the end of the first quarter of 2019, the marketing team at Fulcrum are getting a head start on some spring cleaning. Our website and logo are both getting an overhaul, so don’t be alarmed by the distinct smell of freshness. We did that on purpose.

If you work in construction, you’ve probably noticed smartphones, tablets, and other new technology solutions appearing on job sites over the last few years. If you’ve been in the industry for a long time, you might even find them annoying: Why create complicated new processes when the old ones work just fine?

The systems that provide our world with power and electricity require enormous amounts of data to function. Energy and utility companies must constantly monitor, analyze, and respond to events that affect these complex networks to ensure their customers have electricity.

In 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau launched The Opportunity Project, “a process for engaging government, communities, and the technology industry to create digital tools that address our greatest challenges as a nation”.

The toxic red tide bloom that has plagued Florida since November of 2017 seems to finally have dissipated. Last week, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission reported that the red tide organism, Karenia brevis or K. brevis, is no longer present in water samples.

As designers at Spatial Networks, we are always looking for ways to improve our tools and processes so that we can provide the highest quality user experience for our customers. Over the past year, Figma became one of our primary tools for user interface and user experience design. It has greatly improved our ability to design, prototype, test, and communicate with our teams.

While we try to make Fulcrum as intuitive to use as possible, there are some features that Fulcrum offers that may not stand out as clearly as the others. In this post, we’ll demonstrate some of those features.

Fulcrum is capable of recording location data with each parent record, child record, and media attachment. The location data collected is based on the configured location provider in the operating system on your mobile device. Typically this is the onboard GPS sensor, which is sometimes augmented by the other sensors and radios contained within the device.

We built Fulcrum Community to support humanitarian response projects around the world, so organizations would have a platform for crowdsourcing with local volunteers and responders. For these sorts of projects, map imagery is a critical tool in getting an accurate, up-to-date picture of the reality on the ground.

We’re often asked by customers how to create Fulcrum-compatible offline tile layers from existing map data. We have documentation on how to do this using TileMill, but it can be cumbersome and overwhelming to replicate the process for multiple tile layers and data files. TileMill is an amazing application, but it’s intended to design complete base maps, which means it has a lot of sophistication that’s not typically required when you only need a simple overlay.

We’re excited to be headed out to the SaaStr Annual conference in San Jose, CA next week! This year there’ll be over 300 speakers and 12,000 attendees, all there to share ideas, collaborate, and hear success stories from some of the biggest players in B2B software.

One of the many things people love about Fulcrum is its extensibility. We’re proud to offer a tool that easily integrates with other applications and services to meet the needs of your specific workflow.

As we continue to expand our enterprise offerings, we are excited to announce the release of Fulcrum Audit Logs! Audit Logs provide account administrators with a single source of all user activity within a Fulcrum organization. This detailed activity log can be used to review general user activity, troubleshoot technical issues, or as an audit trail during incident reviews to help monitor and prevent suspicious activity. When you have a large team of users all collaborating on projects with Fulcrum, Audit Logs provide a place for tracking a history of user activity so it’s easier to track changes made over time.

In the words of my Spatial Networks colleagues, 2018 was characterized most by growth, opportunity, technology, passion, and creativity. It was a great year!

Fulcrum customers often have a need to maintain a local version of the data they collect with our platform, in their database system of choice. With our export tool, it’s simple to pull out extracts in formats like CSV, shapefile, SQLite, and even PostGIS or GeoPackage. What this doesn’t allow, though, is an automatable way to keep a local version of data on your own server. You’d have to extract data manually on some schedule and append new stuff to existing tables you’ve already got.

As we reflect on the last year and all that the Spatial Networks team has accomplished, I’d like to share a number with you: 130,021,386.

Over the past several months, the Fulcrum engineering team has been hard at work building out a completely custom image annotation engine from the ground up. This initiative provides a solid foundation for some exciting new features, the first of which we are excited to announce today: Photo annotations are now available on all Professional and Enterprise plans!

What are your business goals for 2019? Increase revenue? Cut unnecessary spending? Decrease employee turnover? Those are sensible goals, but how will you reach them?

As premier sponsors of the American Geographical Society, we try to do our part in promoting geographic literacy, education, and the future of geo sciences.

The holidays have arrived (like it or not), and the clock is ticking. Time to start shopping! Thanks to the Internet, it’s easy to find beautiful and useful geography-themed gifts made by artists all over the world. You’ll find some of our favorites here in our annual holiday gift guide for geo geeks!

I’ve been working in Rails for almost a decade now (which was a sobering realization) and for most of that time I’ve always used gems as a selling point on why Rails is a great framework to learn. With such a rich and active community, there’s a gem for everything — authentication, e-commerce, file uploading, you name it and we got it.

I’ve always said: Ask me to run an office, and no worries, I got it! Then this task fell on my lap — a great combination of departments’ needs and wants, all to be managed by me…

Our semi-annual All Hands events are always energizing and fun-filled, but last week was one for the record books.

PostgreSQL is an amazing open-source database that has a lot of features that many users may not use or even know exist. One of these features is the ability to store data as arrays in a column.

One of the fastest ways to prevent the spread of deadly diseases like Ebola is to catalog instances on a map. This enables emergency planners to monitor the scope of an outbreak and allocate resources to prevent loss of life.

The good news: The current demand for new homes, buildings, and facilities in the United States is higher than it’s been in years, and the construction industry is booming.

Every year since 2014, the American Geographical Society (AGS) has hosted Geography 2050, a multi-year strategic dialogue among thought leaders from academia, government, business, and the nonprofit sector.

From conserving natural resources to reducing business costs, there are lots of reasons to go paperless — but many companies have yet to do it. Maybe it’s because they’re attached to their familiar paper processes, or perhaps they’re simply reluctant to enact change.

Spatial Networks is once again proud to announce our support for the annual Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference. FOSS4G brings together the largest gathering of developers and users of open source geospatial software in the world- and this year it’s all happening in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, one of Africa’s fastest growing cities!

One of the biggest benefits of using mobile forms is the time savings. So naturally, once you’ve made the switch from paper, you’ll want to get your field teams up and running as quickly as possible. In this post, we’ll show you an easy way to get your employees trained on Fulcrum and collecting field data in no time.

Account Executives Jonathan Katzeff and Traci Phillips are in Boca Raton, FL this week representing Fulcrum at the Florida Local Government Information Systems Association (FLGISA) 2018 Annual Conference.

Advances in remote data collection
Collecting data from the field is an essential task across many industries, and recent advances have made it easier than ever.

Over the past several weeks our Product and Engineering teams have been working hard on transitioning our web mapping engine to the Google Maps JavaScript API. With this complete, we are excited to announce that Fulcrum is now fully leveraging Google Maps across the entire platform!

Professionals across many industries — utility, engineering, and construction, especially — are giving up their antiquated pen-and-paper processes and switching to mobile forms, and for good reason:

As we mentioned in a recent post, adding a spatial dimension to your field data vastly increases the value of your efforts, whether you’re collecting information for the purpose of tracking sales or fighting malaria. And all geospatial data collection starts with a basemap.

Fulcrum Data Events allow you to design your own custom behaviors and workflows for your data collection process. From advanced data validation and dynamic lookups to alerts and filtering, Data Events provide a powerful framework for rule-based data collection tailored to your own workflow needs.