Browse Fulcrum blog posts covering mobile data collection, field operations, inspections, and best practices across industries and real-world workflows.
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 And with more than 4.6 million episodes of catastrophic business data loss happening each year2, could your business survive such an event? And what could you do to prevent the problems of catastrophic data loss from interrupting your business? Today I’ll discuss the true cost of a paper-based business workflow and how digital forms mitigate the risks that come from relying on physical forms and paper record keeping.
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! Read on for Fulcrum’s 2015 year in review.
Nowadays, we use our smartphones to find and evaluate everything from local music venues to hot spots to eat lunch. But how does my search engine know when to serve up a list of sushi restaurants when I’m downtown, but serve up a how-to guide when I’m at my house? And what does it take to appear and stay visible in those local searches? Today, I’m taking you through a tour of the local listings ecosystem, from schemas to search snippets, to show you the several important factors and elements that go into appearing and ranking in local search queries.
Nearly all our users run businesses and rely on their mobile devices to store protected company data. We prioritize security and provide tools that help users safeguard their work effectively. This article explains techniques on iOS and Android devices that help users protect data while employees work in the field.
These days, we all have far more accounts and passwords than we know how to manage. Managing over 100 unique usernames and passwords for banking, productivity, hosting, and social media has become overwhelming. As a frequent web user, I personally have over 500 accounts, many of which I rarely use. Occasionally, I still need access to those accounts, adding complexity and increasing risks of sensitive data exposure. A hyper-secure password strategy for online accounts is critical to protect against account compromises and related threats. Strong, unique passwords, regularly updated, are essential, but no one can realistically manage this without assistance. Password management tools like 1Password simplify organization, enhance security, and ensure strong protection for all online accounts.
The Fulcrum team creates a virtual company culture in a number of ways. One of the popular ways to toast one another is through GeoBooze, our Fulcrum + Slack-integrated drinks sharing form.
Thomas Steele-Maley is the Director of Innovation at GEMS World Academy Chicago, and is working on bringing mobile learning to K-12 education.
Our latest update for Fulcrum on Android introduces design updates and improvements aligned with Google’s Material Design specifications. These changes affect layouts, look and feel, and interactions to ensure a more modern, consistent user experience. In version 2.13, you’ll notice the app list now appears as a drawer sliding out from the left. Additionally, the form user interface has been redesigned to conform to Material Design standards, improving overall visual consistency.
Recently, we’ve been expanding and redesigning our App Gallery search functionality, making it much easier to locate relevant apps for specific industries. In order to make new users aware of how Fulcrum could be used, we populate the Fulcrum App Gallery with sample apps. By doing this, we have found that almost all new users start with one or a few of these apps to get started, and on occasion, some improve them for their own use. The use cases of Fulcrum continue to surprise and delight us.
Collecting rich media along with your survey forms is one of Fulcrum’s hallmark capabilities, allowing you to add detail to your collection workflow by using pictures and SpatialVideo. Today, we are introducing audio capture, allowing teams to record audio logs on their iPhone, iPad, or Android devices. This feature lets users attach audio recordings to data records captured directly in the field for improved documentation. It is especially beneficial for users recording field notes by speaking into their device for later transcription. Audio capture is also useful for inspections in tight spaces or when quickly logging observations without typing. This feature saves time and adds significant flexibility to Fulcrum’s already robust and versatile feature set.
This time last year, I was a FEMA employee working in the field of GIS. I was pondering at that time how to develop mobile GIS data collection software that worked on an iPad or iPhone and could be deployed into the field with the Public Assistance teams (their current process involves paper and GPS units, and a lot of data entry done in hotel rooms). This mobile app would need to be extremely easy to use, be able to feed data into a database, and the data be viewable on a live map. This was a challenging proposition, but one that excited me.
Recently, we at Fulcrum came across the AccessLand initiative to provide open data and APIs for “our nation’s parks, forests, monuments, campsites, cabins, and tours.”
Fulcrum customers worldwide are using the platform to collect a huge variety of data in the field, and the dynamic, adaptable nature of Fulcrum allows the flexibility to build the exact tool for the job. Today we’re introducing a new feature to extend this even further: Calculated Fields.
Like many companies who employ off-site team members, Spatial Networks brings everyone together a few times a year for a week of handshakes, hugs, good food, and better beer. Amazingly, some code usually gets shipped as well. Our most recent visit was punctuated by a long awaited change of venue as we moved into our new, custom-designed space, leaving behind an office that never quite felt like home. These visits are important for a variety of reasons, but here are a few that stand out to me each time we have a meeting of those working remotely. Here’s a recap of what got done:
Last month we sent out a customer satisfaction survey to Fulcrum account owners in order to better understand what our customers enjoy about Fulcrum, what they dislike, and how we can make their experience better. Suffice it to say, we learned a lot.
The latest updates to the Fulcrum Android and iOS mobile apps include some great new functionality that we are excited to announce. While every update includes subtle improvements, behind-the-scenes performance enhancements, and bug fixes, this release includes some great new features for truly personalizing your mobile apps, including new custom app icons.
Many Fulcrum users are working indoors, conducting facility inspections of inside spaces. Within large facilities there may be multiple floors and hundreds of rooms to visit to inspect equipment, perform quality checks of plumbing and electrical, or observe the quality of build-outs for future repairs. Even though these types of work happen indoors without access to accurate GPS signals, you can still use Fulcrum’s mapping capabilities to create facility maps and geolocate your data on a reference background.
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.
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”).
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.
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!
To recap, a couple of weeks ago we attended the CFGIS Workshop (Central Florida) 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.
We just completed a major upgrade to the Fulcrum web platform, strengthening our cloud infrastructure and improving performance for our global user base. These improvements ensure greater reliability, security, and scalability as more teams rely on Fulcrum for field data collection.
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.
