Sep 27 2012

New USER ACTIVITY report lets you report on your users’ usage

By the way, this is our 300th blog post!  I’ve gotten very fast typing since starting the GPS Insight blog years ago.

We have had several customers ask about reporting on THEIR USERS (not drivers, users).

They want to see who is running reports, logging in to look at vehicles, and receiving scheduled reports and alerts.

We now have this functionality available here:

New GPS Insight User Activity Report

New GPS Insight User Activity Report

Bear in mind you can choose a range of dates the same way you always do within GPS Insight, by choosing a shortcut for Today, Yesterday, Week to date, last 7 days, Month to date, last 30 days, etc., or just choose the start/end date to choose a custom range.

Here is the output for our account for yesterday:

New GPS Insight User Activity GPS Tracking Report

New GPS Insight User Activity GPS Tracking Report

Note this is only available for administrative users currently.

Thanks,

Rob.

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Sep 11 2012

New Time Format Preference (17:00 vs. 5:00 PM)

We’ve been asked to add this capability for a long time, and finally went through the entire product and added the ability for customers to choose which time format they prefer — 12 or 24 hour (military).  We used to ONLY allow military time across the entire site.

Just open up user preferences, and choose your time format preference:

Change your Time Format user preference

Change your Time Format user preference

And all Reports, Administration, Alerts, Maps, etc. will show the proper time format moving forward:

GPS Insight Activity Alert with AM/PM time

GPS Insight Activity Alert with AM/PM time

AM/PM Time in Administration Screens

AM/PM Time in Administration Screens

And here are side-by-side alerts (different alerts), one with an account which chooses military time (the default) and one with 12 hour format AM/PM time:

2 different time formats in GPS Insight

2 different time formats in GPS Insight

This is probably the longest-standing customer request we had, and we finally took the time to make all the customers who wanted this feature happy.

Sorry it took so long, but now you can have your time format your way!

Thanks,
Rob.

 

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Jul 03 2012

Unsafe Golf Cart Usage by Rob (with alert follow-up)

We have a golf cart and our house is near a really steep hill.

Doing 16 MPH up to the top of the hill in my golf cart

Doing 16 MPH up to the top of the hill in my golf cart

The golf cart is limited to 25 MPH, even downhill (it engine-brakes to keep you from going too fast).

Unless you turn the ignition off…

Then you can zoom down as long as you have guts before stomping on the brake or turning the car back on:

racing to the bottom of a hill in my golfcart

racing to the bottom of a hill in my golfcart

But when you turn the ignition off, you lose your speedometer, so you don’t know how fast you’re going.

I was curious how fast I could get it to go down the hill, & realized I could just look it up in GPS Insight:

Running an Activity Detail Report for my golfcart

Running an Activity Detail Report for my golfcart

And I can easily see the max speed of 45:

Going 45 MPH in a golfcart meant for 25

Going 45 MPH in a golf cart meant for 25

The reason the device keeps reporting even though the ignition is off is because I wanted an easy install & just wired it straight to the battery and programmed it to only report when the vehicle is moving.

This helps me to see that my golf cart hit 45 MPH max on the way down the hill.  And notice that it interprets 5 minutes of non-movement in my garage as “Off” and stops reporting.

And the next step?  Create an alert to let me know any time this is happening so that if my kids try it, they’re in huge trouble:

Alert to let me know any time the golf cart goes > 30 MPH

Alert to let me know any time the golf cart goes > 30 MPH

Any time “Rob Gemcar” goes > 30 MPH (only possible down a hill with the ignition turned off — otherwise it hits 28 or so absolute max), WITHIN our subdivision called Forest Highlands, I will get an SMS text message instantly, as well as an email, alerting me to this fact (along with a map of the location in the email).  I included it in our subdivision so that if it’s ever put on a flatbed for transportation to the dealer or something, it won’t alert as it’s going > 30 MPH on surface streets outside our community (it’s not licensed for streets > 35 MPH).

By the way, we’ve worked with companies in the past to prove that their vehicles were going DOWNHILL when they exceeded the supposed maximum set by them in their rig — they did it by putting the truck in neutral and coasting to more than the max allowable speed.  That’s where I got the idea to check GPS Insight to see how fast the vehicle was actually going (it felt more like 50!).  I promise, it wasn’t that unsafe though…  I value my life.

Don’t try this at home!

Rob.

[Update: I was late for dinner last night & at a friend's house, & in a hurry, so I performed the "go fast downhill" trick and predictably, got an alert emailed and via text to my phone -- here they are:]

GPS Insight alert email for speeding down the hill

GPS Insight alert email for speeding down the hill

And here’s the text I got:

GPS Insight SMS alert for speeding down the hill

GPS Insight SMS alert for speeding down the hill

Note that the actual reporting time of the point as 6:47:32 PM, and it was sent at 6:48:30 PM, which is why the alert appears to be 2 minutes later [it was only 58 seconds, which is typical].  We round “down” and the email/sms round “up” with dates:

Raw GPS Data for golf cart speeding event

Raw GPS Data for golf cart speeding event

Running an alert report shows it was sent at 18:48:30:

Running an alert report

Running an alert report

Running an alert report

Alert sent at 18:40:30

Just a good example of how much information we have available to support the alerts we send.

Rob.

 

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May 06 2012

Have it your way! — Add data you want to GPS Insight now!

We just released our newest feature — CUSTOMER SPECIFIC CUSTOM CATEGORIES AND ATTRIBUTES.

This is a big deal.

Here’s how it works (silly example — but you’ll get the concept & can adapt to your needs):

Say your company is an ice cream delivery company and you need to know what type of ice cream each truck carries.

Launch Custom Categories and Attributes here:

Open Category/Attribute creation screen

Open Category/Attribute creation screen

Then click on “Create new Attribute” (you can choose to treat it like a category, which is a set of pre-populated values, in the next screen):

Create a new Attribute (or category)

Create a new Attribute (or category)

Then make some changes in the highlighted fields and create your category (this is for Ice Cream Type).

Create a Custom Category

Create a Custom Category

Do the same to create your Attribute (Freezer Capacity in Gallons):

Create a custom Attribute within GPS Insight

Create a custom Attribute within GPS Insight

Then click on one of the available green “checkmarks” to assign values to your vehicles.  Note that Custom Categories and Attributes can be assigned to Users, Vehicles, Drivers, Landmarks, and Hierarchy Nodes:

Click on a category "checkbox" to assign values

Click on a category "checkmark" to assign values

Now you can assign your pre-determined Category values by clicking on each vehicles’ list of options and choosing one.  Soon, you will be able to use a new interface to choose multiple options, and we will allow for spreadsheet import assignment of custom values to vehicles & other GPS Insight Object types.

Assign Ice Cream Types to your trucks

Assign Ice Cream Types to your trucks

Then assign your freezer capacity values:

Assign freezer capacity values

Assign freezer capacity values

And now, you can click on the “Custom” tab within GPS Insight’s 2D mapping to see the custom categories/attributes and the vehicle’s values.  This is helpful when referencing business specific information on a particular truck, and can be customized to keep track of ANYTHING you want.

Custom Category and Attributes displayed in GPS Insight maps

Custom Category and Attributes displayed in GPS Insight maps

We also show this data in free-form format within 3D mapping when choosing a vehicle:

GPS Insight 3D Mapping with custom category and attribute information

GPS Insight 3D Mapping with custom category and attribute information

And you can re-use that category in order to assign it to landmarks (or anything) — let’s say our distribution centers need to ALSO be labeled with a particular Ice Cream type:

Edit a Category to assign it to another object category

Edit a Category to assign it to another object category

Check the “Landmark” checkbox:

Add Landmarks to a custom Category

Add Landmarks to a custom Category

And now you can click on the NEW green checkmark to start editing the values for your landmarks:

Edit Landmark Category Values with one click

Edit Landmark Category Values with one click

Just click, enter, and OK each landmark (this will use our new rapid edit screen soon for even quicker entry):

Edit values for a landmark's Ice Cream Type

Edit values for a landmark's Ice Cream Type

And now when looking at that landmark, it will show you that information informationally:

Show custom information about a Landmark within GPS Insight using Categories and Attributes

Show custom information about a Landmark within GPS Insight using Categories and Attributes

And when it’s time to “clean up” (as I need to do after using a customer for this example…) you just click on the trash can to delete the Category/Attribute and all associated data (we ask you to confirm first):

Delete a Category/Attribute after you're done with it

Delete a Category/Attribute after you're done with it

And coming soon, you’ll be able to use Categories and Attributes when filtering vehicles on a map, vehicles to appear in a report, and as parameters and filters in alerts (e.g. you’ll be able to set a “max number of minutes idling before alert” on different vehicles and alert whenever that threshold is exceeded).

Here is a sample screen (proof of concept):

Filter vehicles using Category and Attribute values

Filter vehicles using Category and Attribute values

This is REALLY POWERFUL STUFF and will help us to do even more custom work for our customers easily.  Between the Hierarchy capabilities and the Custom Categories and Attributes, the sky is the limit as to how granular we can get in your mapping, reporting, and alerting capabilities.

Please let us know if you need some training on this powerful new capability.

Thanks,

Rob.

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May 02 2012

New “rapid edit” mode for tedious updates in GPS Insight

With some of our new capabilities (Categories and Attributes) coming soon, we have been making some major changes to the interface to ensure our customers (AND WE!) don’t spend too much time editing things “one at a time.”

One major internal area we needed improvement for was a set of vehicle-specific device options which our fulfillment and support staff use all the time.

They complained that whenever we need to update a large number of devices all at once (thankfully a problem for us — we’ve been selling a lot of large deployments lately), they need to edit the vehicles one at a time.

No more!  We have a new interface control which allows for quick and easy “all at once” editing — we launch it here (from our new “one click” list):

Open the GPS Insight "edit multiple vehicles" menu

Open the GPS Insight "edit multiple vehicles" menu

This allows us to rapidly edit ALL administrative options for vehicles:

Rapid edit tool for administration of vehicles (and more)

Rapid edit tool for administration of vehicles (and more)

(bear in mind the prior screen is for our internal account, which is why many “guinea pig” devices haven’t reported for a while — we don’t always clean these up right away…)

Note that the “tab vertically” option is set automatically and allows us to rapidly enter values or use the space bar to toggle options then tab to the next vehicle vertically.

Ghost "saved" icons show you what's been modified

Ghost "saved" icons show you what's been modified

And whenever you make a change, the green “checkbox” lights up to indicate that it’s been saved.  Then it fades to a light green checkbox, so you can see which values were changed overall.

That allows you to go back and ensure you changed the correct vehicles (and lets me go back and reverse my “for the blog” changes easily).

We will add this capability where appropriate.  Previously, if we wanted to edit all these vehicles, we would have to click on the pencil icon and then edit each one individually.

Thanks to everyone buying lots of devices to force us to streamline this for ourselves and our customers!

Rob.

 

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Apr 24 2012

GPS Insight exhibits at NAFA 2012 in St. Louis

Category: Conferences,GPS Insight Employees,Uncategorizedbbarker @ 10:02 am

We just got back from the NAFA 2012 conference. NAFA is the National Association of Fleet Administration (also known as the “Fleet Management Association”). This was our 6th consecutive year exhibiting and it was even bigger and better than previous years.

Here are photos of our booth and Team GPSI:

GPS Insight booth at NAFA 2012

GPS Insight booth at NAFA 2012

Team GPSI (from left to right -- Ryan, Alissa, Rob, Chelsea, Harry, Elliot)

Team GPSI (from left to right -- Ryan, Alissa, Rob, Chelsea, Harry, Elliot)

It’s always great to meet new people and see familiar faces at these conferences. We appreciate everyone who stopped by our booth – see you next year in Atlantic City, NJ!

-Rob

 

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Jan 17 2012

It took less than 3 minutes to make my wife happy using GPS Tracking

I was getting some work done today when my wife sent me this email at 3:35 PM:

Request from my wife to fix an alert

Request from my wife to fix an alert

I bought a new car, so my old car (Rob 4000) doesn’t alert her like it used to when I set it up to text her automatically whenever I leave the office (blog article about that here).

I have a new car and new device (Rob 3900) and sometimes drive another car (Rubicon) now so instead of a single car notifying her, I thought I would do the following:

  • Make a group called “Robs Cars”
  • Change the Landmark Alert from a single vehicle (Rob 4000) to a Group of vehicles (RobCars) containing these 2 vehicles (devices)

So here’s how I did all that in less than 3 minutes (1 minute of it was just opening a window and signing in):

3:36:15 PM: I opened up Vehicle Administration to add a new vehicle group: [the screen capture program I use timestamped the files so that's how I can get the timeline easily]

Open Vehicle Administration in GPS Insight

Open Vehicle Administration in GPS Tracking Dashboard

3:36:27: I clicked on “Create New Vehicle Group”:

Create new vehicle group

Create new vehicle group

3:37:02: Add the vehicles to the new RobCars Group

Add 2 devices (vehicles) to new RobCars group

Add 2 devices (vehicles) to new RobCars group

3:37:24: Open the Alerts Manager:

Open the GPS Insight Alerts Manager

Open the GPS Insight Alerts Manager

3:37:43: Open up the “Coming Home Alert” for edit:

Edit an alert in GPS Insight

Edit an alert in GPS Insight

3:37:56: Change the single vehicle “Rob 4000″ to the Group of vehicles “RobsCars”:

Change vehicle to a group

Change vehicle to a group

Change vehicle to a group

Change vehicle to a group

All done in less than 3 minutes:

3 minutes to make a change in GPS Insight

3 minutes to make a change in GPS Insight

 

Now I don’t need to call my wife when heading home to see if she needs anything — she’ll get an email and text message every time now (again).

And because it takes just a couple minutes to make substantial changes within GPS Insight, I did it right away — just like our customers can make changes to ensure their alerts, reports, groups, etc. are always up to date.  And if the GPS tracking system is easy to administer, it actually gets used properly and to the full extent.

If it only took me less than 30 minutes to fix up the images and write the blog article about it…

Rob.

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Aug 10 2011

Traffic added to GPS Insight browser maps

GPS Insight has supported traffic for years via Google Earth.

Finally we’re bringing real-time traffic data to the dashboard and 2D mapping.

Here’s a screenshot:

 

GPS Insight releases traffic data in maps

GPS Insight releases traffic data in maps

 

Just a single click and you’ll get real-time, color-based traffic overlays in your maps.

Enjoy!

Rob.

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Mar 19 2011

I’ve (We’ve) Been busy! — lots of new capabilities

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=

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

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"

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

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!

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

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

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

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.

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Feb 18 2011

Scheduled Reports now have a link to run the “live” report

GPS Insight has sent over 1.27 million automated reports to our customers.

We recently made them more convenient for everyone.

The “Scheduled” reports never had certain links activated such as “create landmark from this stop” or embedded maps, due to security concerns.

We just added a “Re-run Report” feature on every report which fixes this.

Now when you open your report via email, if  you want to run it “live” in the system, you just click on the link shown below:

Re-Run a GPS Insight Report

Re-Run a GPS Insight Report

This takes you straight to the report if you’re already logged in, or to an intermediate login screen if you are not:

Log in to GPS Insight to run your report automatically

Log in to GPS Insight to run your report automatically

Once you provide your login and password, you will be automatically shown the “live” report, which you can sort, click through links on, etc.:

Sort on the "live" version of a scheduled report

Sort on the "live" version of a scheduled report

Then, if you feel like sharing this report with someone else, you can click “Email Report” and share it with them:

Email a report to a colleague

Email a report to a colleague

Note that I changed the email address to mine in order to actually receive the report.  Also note that once you click “Email Now” we conveniently give you a link to that email address for you to send an additional explanatory email if necessary:

email address to click on to send additional information

email address to click on to send additional information

And here is the emailed version of the report, which also contains the .xls, .csv, and .html versions for you to click through to if the “in line” html version isn’t enough (or if your email client doesn’t like to display html properly).

Emailed Report from GPS Insight

Emailed Report from GPS Insight

We’re always looking for good ways to make our product more useful, & it was a customer’s comment about how scheduled reports were great, but also limiting since they didn’t have the “live” feel — this is the only way to get the best of all 3 worlds — convenient (emailed nightly/weekly), powerful (live and clickable), and secure (requiring a valid login/password).

Enjoy!

Rob.

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