Jul 23 2011
We made the new GPS Insight Dashboard available last week to customers (in Beta).
Here is the new demo!:
New GPS Insight Dashboard Demo
Click on the image to watch the video and enjoy the new GPS Insight Dashboard. It’s several months of hard work and REALLY good. Enjoy!
Thanks,
Rob.
Apr 16 2011
This new Landmark Stop Dashlet helps you see how many visits your vehicles are making to landmarks and how long they stay along with averages.
This might help you to see your vehicles’ average visit times to loading zones/transfer stations/warehouses/customers/etc.
GPS Insight Landmark Stops Dashlet
You can modify which vehicle group, which landmark group, how many days you want to go back (1, 2, or 3), what you want to sort by, how many lines to display, and whether you want totals or averages to be displayed.
GPS Insight Landmark Stops Dashlet
This coming week will let you modify how frequently it auto-refreshes.
What is most convenient about this dashlet is you can click through to ANY landmark to run the corresponding landmark report instantly.
Click through to Sky Harbor Airport for a report
And instantly (.2451 seconds…) you get your listing of 3 vehicles which have passed through Sky Harbor Airport with detailed information — even what direction they were traveling (in the Distance column):
GPS Insight Landmark Report
As with many of our dashlets, this may not be necessary for many customers, but for some customers, it’s going to be a huge help in determining which landmarks are experiencing backups for the day and taking action.
If you like it, it’s under “Dispatch” and if you don’t, you can leave it in the Dashlet Dock.
Thanks,
Rob.
Apr 16 2011
After loading our “horizontal” interface with 79 distinctly different options (not all are available under every user name), we are FINALLY going to make the interface a little easier to use and more convenient for all.
We should have a beta version available in May. We’ll make sure everyone knows how to get access to use it.
Here is a preview:
Preview of GPS Insight's new Dashboard Interface
Major improvements will include “tabs” at the top which will default to “best practices” dashboards. As always, every dashboard can be configured by the end user, but our new “default” dashboards will be more usable out of the box. Additionally, customers will be able to configure their tabs to their requirements and add as many custom tabs as they want.
Map/Report/Administration menus will flow “downward” rather than horizontally as has been the case with GPS Insight for 6 years now.
Rather than “pull the plug” on existing customers when it’s time to move to this new interface, we will make BOTH available indefinitely. This will ensure you will be able to transition at your own pace. We expect most customers should really appreciate the new interface and at once point we will make it “the default” to try to get wide-spread adoption.
As with other “deprecated” features within GPS Insight, the old dashboard may not support new features when they are released so we encourage everyone to utilize it when it’s released in May.
We look forward to this release, and encourage you to give us any feedback you have to ensure we consider it while completing this major improvement in GPS Insight.
Here is one more screen shot:
Preview of GPS Insight's new Dashboard Interface
Enjoy!
Thanks,
Rob.
Mar 19 2011
Sorry, it’s been a while since I put any new blog articles up.
I had knee (ACL) surgery 5 weeks ago (the day I dispatched myself to the hospital here).
Not fun, don’t tear your ACL. And don’t think you can play paintball with your 11 year old when you’re 41, not 22 like when you were in the Army.
So, in the meantime though, we’ve added a few new capabilities which I want to let everyone know about.
Dispatch multiple vehicles at once
We had a customer ask if they could dispatch multiple vehicles to the same place (e.g. a fire) using Garmin. The next day we put that in place for them via our “Closest To” dashlet.
Here is how you do that:
Dispatch multiple vehicles at once to an address/landmark/vehicle/lat-lon
Use the familiar “Closest To” dashlet to find the closest vehicles to your site, then sort by the appropriate column (driving distance, travel time, or absolute distance), then choose your threshold (in this case 30 minutes or less) and un-check the ones you wish to exclude (or toggle them all using “Check/Uncheck All” — then just click on “Dispatch Selected Vehicles” and they are all dispatched. Note that ONLY Garmin enabled vehicles are eligible, and you can still click on the Garmin logo (blue triangle) in order to dispatch just a single vehicle. Pretty cool, and convenient (beats clicking 5-20 Garmin icons to dispatch everyone). We are working on allowing you to “un-dispatch” drivers and it will be available in a month or so. This will delete the dispatch items from the drivers’ Garmin.
Run a favorite/saved Report with 2 clicks (maybe more)
We added a “Scheduled Reports” dashlet which allows you to simply click on a saved/scheduled report and run it in the browser at that time.
This is pretty self-explanatory and available in the “Utilities” dashlets, as shown below:
Drag and drop new scheduled reports dashlet to access it
[by the way, note the top right -- as I was writing this in the passenger seat of my vehicle Nav2, I checked quickly to see what exit I needed to take to get to where we were taking the family for the weekend -- we use GPS Insight all the time ourselves, even from a moving vehicle on an aircard while getting some past-due blog articles published!]
list of scheduled reports - filtered to only ones containing the word "Landmark"
Choose one (we chose the bottom one — the rarely used “Unmarked Landmarks Report” which shows stops NOT IN a known landmark:
Choose a report and then change the vehicle group/dates if necessary
Then run the report and out comes your result. This dashlet helps you run frequently-run reports very easily. Here’s the report, 4 seconds later:
Easily run report!
This is available now for all customers to use. You can also edit the settings to show ONLY/BOTH active/inactive reports, as well as how many reports to show per page.
Vehicle Selector filters now change the vehicles shown on the dashboard maps
When you filter the list of vehicles in your vehicle selector dashlet now, any maps it is tied to (via dashlet group letter) now restrict which vehicles are shown. This is convenient if you have a large number of vehicles, but only want to see a certain number of them by either filtering or un-checking them in the vehicle selector dashlet:
Way too many vehicles on the map
Now after filtering by adding “*3000″ (or you could uncheck some as well):
Just the vehicles you want to look at
And of course clicking on one will zoom you straight to that vehicle, as always:
clicking on a vehicle takes you right there
That’s it for this (long) update on what’s new. We have several other features I’ll get around to highlighting shortly as well.
Rob.
Jan 09 2011
Our new dashboard maps now allow you to click on individual items in order to instantly run a supporting report:
Click through on a graph item for supporting information
The report is then shown in a new Browser window or tab:
GPS Insight Idling Report from a graph click-through
Then you can continue to click through and choose to view the data in a Google Earth (or standard map) window:
Google Earth view of Idling Report data for a vehicle
Zooming down to an individual idling incident to investigate
Having the ability to quickly zoom down from a high level graph to detailed, satellite-view specifics truly enables our customers (you) to find out what is going on with your fleet in minutes. Just look for outliers on the graphs, and drill down to see the supporting activity.
Note that you can run the report for the entire group (vs. a single vehicle) by clicking elsewhere in most graphs:
Clicking on the legend usually runs the full summary report or a particular summary utilizing certain thresholds, such as all speeding incidents > 21 MPH over the posted speed limit, as shown below:
Click through for the report on all > 21 MPH over speeding incidents
We are constantly providing new capabilities for our customers — be sure to ask us for whatever you can think may help you and your organization to get more Return On Investment from your GPS Insight GPS Fleet Tracking System.
Thanks,
Rob.
Jan 09 2011
Sometimes customers (and I) spend a minute or two customizing a dashlet to be “just right.”
But then what if you want 2, 3, 4, or more copies of that same dashlet? You used to have to do the same thing 2, 3, 4, or more times.
Not now! I got tired of that so we developed a “copy” function to carry all those settings forward into a new Dashlet with the only difference being the vehicle group (which is taken from the “available dashlets” dock):
So I create a customized version of the location dashlet:
Customize your GPS Insight Dashlet
In this case I changed the update interval to 1 minute, show the Address/City/State, and show Landmark Names when they are inside a landmark.
Now if you want a copy of that dashlet with a NEW vehicle group (in this case ATL [Atlanta]) you just click the new “Copy” button near the other buttons (Edit, Move, Minimize, Close):
Create a copy of your GPS Insight dashboard dashlet
After clicking the copy button, a new copy of that dashlet appears but with the ATL group chosen instead:
Copy of the GPS Location dashlet is created
Now when you want to see something specific for 3, 6, 9, etc. different groups, you just need to choose the group once in the dock dropdown, and click copy. The dashlet is created exactly where the first one is, and the original is pushed down one. You can then move them around as you need to.
THEN REMEMBER TO CLICK SAVE on your dashboard:
Save your new dashboard layout here!
That’s it — we just made your custom dashboards much easier to create!
And, by the way, we increased the number of dashboards you can save from 10 to 40 recently, so you can really have one for about every application of your operations.
Rob.
Jan 06 2011
We added a new “clock” dashlet to GPS Insight for people who want to see what time it is without having to look at their tiny, typically inaccurate, little Windows time at the bottom right. It inherits your timezone/DST preferences, but you can override them:
New GPS Insight Clock Dashlet
We get our times from the server which is sync’d to an atomic clock so it’s always guaranteed accurate (well, since browsers aren’t always perfect, you can expect it to be within 1-2 seconds at all times):
Here is a picture of the clock on an actual dashboard, next to the “supposed” real time:
New GPS Insight Clock Dashlet
And here is where you find it on the list of available dashlets, under “utility”:
New GPS Insight Clock Dashlet
Sorry we missed getting it out there for your New Years countdowns! Enjoy!
Rob.
Nov 29 2010
We have added a new filter & selection capability to our “Vehicle Selector” under the Graphs area of the dashlet “drawer”:
Now you can unselect certain vehicles so they disappear from graphs, and you can add a “wildcard” filter to impact what vehicles show up in graphs.
Soon we will support this for maps and in other areas of the product.
Here’s how it works:
Use the GPS Insight vehicle selector to "unselect" certain vehicles
Let’s say you have a few vehicles which are “off the charts” in the graph (shown with arrows above).
You can just uncheck their checkbox and they instantly disappear from those graphs:
Uncheck certain vehicles to remove them from graphs
Notice how the graphs are much less skewed now:
Adjusting graphs by removing certain vehicles
And you can also show only certain vehicles which match a “wildcard” pattern (in this case “*4000*” to show all vehicles with the string 4000 in them:
Choose only *4000* vehicles
Using this capability, you can now see exactly which vehicles you want in any graph, and we have many more graphs coming. Soon there will be a “comparison” graph which will show what your chosen vehicles look like relative to all vehicles or just a certain “reference group.”
Stay tuned & enjoy these new capabilities!
Thanks,
Rob.
Nov 11 2010
We have a number of companies which have asked for GPS Insight to support Metric vs. English (e.g. Kilometers vs. Miles, Liters vs. Gallons, etc.).
So we now officially support Metric throughout the site for non-US customers, and for those in the US which prefer Metric (who would want a measurement system which was in even 10′s, 100′s, 1000′s? That’s crazy!)
Every place in our solution where Imperial measurements exist, they now support Metric — here is the dashboard interface with a couple examples:
GPS Insight support the Metric system
Every one of our reports also supports Metric, typically Kilometers vs. Miles & KPM vs. MPH:
Here I run a Fleet Usage Summary report:
Running a GPS Insight fleet usage report
And the results are now in Kilometers:
GPS Insight reports using Kilometers now (optionally)
Every one of our 35 or so reports now support Metric, so if you need it, it’s there for you. Here is one more report, the GPS Insight Speed Summary Report:
GPS Insight reports using Kilometers now (optionally)
Now that we got this into the product, the first thing we heard was “can you support international date format too…?” (DD/MM/YYYY) Why doesn’t everyone just adopt the US standards???… We’ll get going on that shortly next. (by the way, we DO have a Spanish version of the site available also, although the translation may not be perfect…)
Rob.
Oct 26 2010
A customer recently asked us:
From: <deleted>
Sent: Thursday, October 21, 2010 11:56 AM
To: support
Subject: Location list
Is it possible to have the time the vehicle stopped at a location rather than how long it has been stopped be displayed on the vehicle location list? For example 2:35 p.m. rather than stopped for 10 minutes.
Thank you,
Lori
We added this to the product here:
New "stop time" column option in Location dashlet
After making this change to the dashlet, it shows up like this (note that Joe turned from yellow to red since his stop is now > 1 hour):
New "stop time" column option in Location dashlet
It took less than 5 days from the time she asked for it October 21, until the time we had that feature done today:
From: <deleted>
Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2010 10:20 AM
To: Adam Varner
Subject: RE: Location list
THANK YOU!!! You guys are awesome.
Lori,
Your request has been completed and you can now select ‘Stop Time’ in the menu of the Location dashlet.
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So, when you have a good idea or need the product changed just a bit for your needs — please ask. We have a very configurable product to begin with, but our dashboard architecture allows us to add new capabilities and features/options almost instantly. And if you are thinking about purchasing GPS Insight vs. a competitive product, please know that there is about a 0% chance that the other provider can do this for you like we do. It’s what makes us different in the space & is a big distinguishing factor. Try us out with a pilot & think of something for us to modify — we do it all the time & are happy to take your thoughtful requests for enhancements.
Thanks & enjoy the new capabilities we bring you several times a week.
Rob.
