May 24 2010

New “Recent Alerts” dashlet in GPS Insight

Category: Alerts, New Features, dashboard dashletsrdonat @ 11:04 pm

A couple weeks ago, a customer with ambulances asked if we could give them a dashlet which showed a list of recent landmark visits.

Presumably they wanted to know when their medical personnel arrived/left certain hospitals.

That was too “specific” to just their one particular request, so we opened the requirement up to fit more than just that one need.

I had our developers work on an “alert ticker” (we call it “Recent Alerts” on the Dashboard).

It looks like this:

GPS Insight Alerts ticker

GPS Insight Alerts ticker

Like all dashlets, you drag and drop it onto the dashboard where you want it to go.

Then you configure the settings (which vehicle group, which alert (or all alerts), how far back you want to see, and how many lines you want to see at once):

New GPS Insight Recent Alerts Dashlet

New GPS Insight Recent Alerts Dashlet

You will notice that for our account, we have multiple redundant alerts, and many of our devices are temporary so they go “out of range” since they aren’t installed into our vehicles permanently since we’re constantly testing on our own vehicles (e.g. they lose power when we shut the vehicle off).  This is why there are some duplicate alerts and we have a few “Out of Range” alerts, battery voltage alerts, etc.

The point though is to show you that when alerts are triggered, you can see them on the dashboard as well as receive them on your cell phone/email.

In fact, we made it so that you no longer need to send alerts to an email/SMS phone # — you can leave that blank, & they’ll only be viewable on this dashlet.

Since our “fleet” of employees tends not to idle or drive off-hours (at least not right now for me to show you), I pulled up another customer & they had a few recent problems with their drivers.  Notice that I “hid” the Alert Type column, since it’s only there until you figure out what the various colors represent, and can be “unchecked” along with “Alert Name” in the edit properties area (click on the pencil to get there):

Odd Hours & idling alerts on the GPS Insight Recent Alerts Dashboard Dashlet

Odd Hours & idling alerts on the GPS Insight Recent Alerts Dashboard Dashlet

If you want, you can create a dashboard full of these for all of your various alerts, and segment them into different areas:

This one I created quickly for our account:

GPS Insight Multiple Alert History Dashboard

GPS Insight Multiple Alert History Dashboard

And always remember to save your dashboard!

Save your Dashboard after creating it!

Save your Dashboard after creating it!

So now next time you log in you can recall it!

So now next time you log in you can recall it!

This is a pretty useful capability.  And it took us only 5 days to create based on this requirement — make sure to ask us in case you ever have a need you would like help with.  Usually it’s in the product, where you might not know we do what you require, and if it isn’t, we’ll typically put it on the list of new capabilities and sometimes get to it as quickly as within the week.  We’re really that quick!

To learn more about GPS Fleet Tracking Alerts visit  our website.

Thanks,

Rob.

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Feb 03 2010

New Map Dashlet size & “Follow Me” capabilities

Category: Mapping, New Features, dashboard dashletsrdonat @ 11:28 pm

We recently made some new enhancements to our Dashboard Maps.

Now you can size them in any of 4 heights (and the width is determined by the dashboard style you choose).

Additionally, we allow you to display 8 maps per window now, vs. 4. You can still open as many windows as your PC is OK with.

In addition, we now allow you to “follow” a single vehicle, and display ALL the vehicles around it (determined by which vehicle group you choose).

Here is a screen shot of 3 “half-height” maps which are all “following” a different vehicle (noted in the title area of each map):

3 "Follow me" half-height graphs in GPS Insight's Dashboard

3 "Follow me" half-height maps in GPS Insight's Dashboard

These are only the right-most column of the full dashboard, which has a “twice-height map in the middle:

New multi-height maps within GPS Insight

New multi-height maps within GPS Insight

You can choose which vehicle or vehicle group to SHOW, which landmark group to DISPLAY, which vehicle or vehicle group to FOLLOW, and which zoom level to use.  Additionally, the same Map Group choices apply so you can “tie” these maps to the other various dashlets (e.g. location, alerts, landmarks, etc.).

As always, click on the “pencil” icon at the top right of the map dashlet to open the edit settings screen which looks like this:

GPS Insight Map Dashlet Settings

GPS Insight Map Dashlet Settings

Make sure to save your dashboard here:

Save your changes to the GPS Insight dashboard!

Save your changes to the GPS Insight dashboard!

An upcoming enhancement will allow you to simply “tear off” a vehicle from a dashlet to automatically show that vehicle in a “follow me” map, which will make it quicker to create these ad-hoc maps for vehicles you may have a short term interest in following closely.

View our GPS Vehicle Tracking Features for more information on what we can do.

Rob.

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