GPS Insight is about to launch two new highly powerful capabilities:
- Hierarchy-based vehicle permissions
- Custom Filters for Attribute and Category data
They may not sound like much, but for very large deployments, they’re CRITICAL to help avoid nightmarish administration tasks.
Here’s how they’ll work:
Hierarchy-based vehicle permissions:
First, you need a hierarchy (or 3, as shown in this example — one for geographic location, one for type of vehicle, and one for type of fuel):
Geographic "nodes" assigned to a user
Let’s say we want a new user (in this case, called “ar-atl”) to have access to Georgia (GA), Nevada (NV), as shown in green above, plus ALL THEIR CHILDREN.
We can assign ONLY these 2 nodes to that user, and specify how “far down” the tree we want to grant permission (e.g. maybe down to the city such as Reno, NV (REN), but NOT beyond that to the West Reno, East Reno, etc. levels, if they existed).
We can do that like this, as well as add all “Function: Delivery” and “Type of Fuel: Green” to this user. This way they’ll get ALL the members of Delivery and Green (e.g. CNG, Electric, Hybrid, Volt, etc.), as shown below. We can add multiple nodes to a user per hierarchy, such as BOTH GA and NV for the US (Geographic) hierarchy:
Assigning permissions on Hierarchy Nodes to users
Hovering over the user now shows you the permissions assigned to that user:
Permissions assigned and inherited by users
This allows us to provide Hierarchy capabilities to ALL users — not just administrators, as it has previously been available. PLEASE BEAR IN MIND that the hierarchy is available ONLY to large accounts (e.g. > 100 vehicles) as it is generally unnecessary for small fleets, since they can use vehicle groups to do the same thing. If you are a large fleet customer of ours, and are not currently using the hierarchy, you can contact Sales or Support to ask for it to be turned on for your account. It is a HUGE time-saver in many ways, and you can click here for more information on the Hierarchy capabilities of GPS Insight.
Now onto Custom Filters for Attribute and Category data:
Initially they will be available on 2D mapping, shown here, by pressing the “Attributes and Categories” button (and I’ve already restricted the vehicles by choosing a Group when launching the map (All Vehicles) and choosing ONLY vehicles with the letter “e” in them, using the “Filter List:” box:
Accessing Filters in GPS Insight
This opens up a screen which allows you to create a highly specific filter, based on any category and attribute data you may have specified for your vehicles.
Here, I’ll create a very loose filter which requires ANY (vs. ALL) of the 3 conditions to be met:
Filtering vehicles with custom categories and attributes
Since “Alena” has one of the “Compressor, Generator, Jackhammer & Winch” which are specified in the 2nd criteria, the vehicle shows up on the map:
Vehicle matches the filter
If I change the filter to ALL (and some other changes), we get only the single vehicle which meets those criteria:
New, more restrictive filter
Fewer vehicles match this filter
Fewer vehicles match this filter
And note that you can SAVE your filters for future use:
Saving a custom filter in GPS Insight
And use them like this:
Using a previously saved filter
This will really help ALL our customers to better utilize and benefit from this functionality by filtering maps, and soon reports, dashlets, and alerts with HIGHLY custom data which they can assign to vehicles. Filters will also eventually apply to OTHER areas of GPS Insight where categories and attributes are assigned — for instance running a report on only landmarks in the “Customers” group of landmarks which have a “to be serviced by” date in the next 7 days. Or sending idle alerts for vehicles which don’t have the “ignore idle” attribute set to “yes.”
There’s no practical limit to how complicated you can make these filters — there is the ability to “nest” them within each other so you can say things like:
“Only show vehicles which are corporate unless they are both personal and have a winch, but exclude all of those whose registration expired before today.
Both custom filters and hierarchy based permissions will be available to all customers by the end of August, and as always, we will continue to add functionality as it is required by our customers.
Enjoy & Thanks!
Rob.
