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.
Tags: dispatching multiple vehicles, Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking software, Garmin, GPS Tracking, gps tracking system, New Features, saved reports, Vehicle Tracking
