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Searching and Filtering Data with Fulcrum’s Web Dashboard

November 19, 2013

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.

In addition to the current data management dashboard features, allowing you to browse your data on a map, table, or split/combined view, we just added a few other big improvements to make data review, QA, and field service management tools even more powerful.

Search, filter, and sort

Full Text Search

First up, we’ve added a full text search box right inside the data management dashboard. This will search all of the data within that particular app, and filter down the result set on either the map or table views to only the data you’re looking for. The search index will look through all text-based attributes in your data, including the contents of text, choice, numeric, and address fields. Finding a particular piece of data is now as simple as a quick search – which is particularly useful for data collected with extensive forms.

Filtering

Fulcrum has a few field types that allow you to do some workflow and data control to help make your field collection efforts more efficient:

  • Project Fields allow you to logically group your data together (i.e. using a standard “tree inventory” app to capture data inside the “Clearwater Tree Mapping” project).
  • Record Assignment Fields gives you the ability to delegate a specific record to one of your users, and to control who has access to edit. A great method for batching out workloads to specific field team members.
  • Status Fields are special picklist fields that are customizable, and let you build status tracking into your workflow, and also control coloring / symbology on both the web and mobile devices.

Now within our data management dashboard, we’ve added capabilities to apply filters to your data while reviewing and editing. If you have data assigned to different users, and are using status fields for tracking a “pass / fail” state of an inspection project, you can create a filter to only view exactly what you need to see, making it far simpler to work with large volumes of changing data.

In the video, I demonstrate how searching and filtering can be used to review your data, make edits to it, and potentially reassign records that need to be revisited or corrected. In the example, a team conducting building inspections is out in the field doing their work and syncing their reports back to the server, while a manager is in the back office doing QA and review to check the work. With full metadata attribution on records, including who added or edited data, timestamps, and location data, the management dashboard makes your field operations even more efficient – data can be checked and reported on quickly, removing the need to wait for inbound reports, and review manually. Feedback can even be sent back out to the field while your teams are still on-site.

The search and filter features are just a couple of the upcoming new capabilities for data management in Fulcrum. If you’d like to check it out but don’t yet have an account, start your free trial now. Stay tuned for even more cool stuff in the coming weeks, and let us know what you think of the new functionality.