Introducing the New ArcGIS Field Maps: The All-in-One App

good morning everyone thank you for coming to february chat so the topic for today is is really really the one that everybody is interested is introducing the new arcgis field maps all in one app for field data collections so many of you probably already use collector for arcgis and other field apps and you want to hear more what is the arcgis field map so we bring the person that in charge is this from the product lead of the field apps jeff shannon okay so jeff jenner will really talk about this new app and also give all the demo and answer all the questions now before we start there let me just also introduce you that we have a new uh education chat new landing page okay so this is the link i'm gonna copy and paste into the chat but basically this is built using arcgis hub so you can see all the the previews and upcoming so let me just share in here so you can see first is the upcoming chat and the future chat and all the recording of the previous topics so any of you want to listen to the recording again you can always go here okay so again i'm gonna copy and then paste it to the chat without further ado i'm gonna stop sharing here and i'm gonna let um jeff start and introduce yourself more jeff hey thank you uh and thanks for having me today i'm i'm really excited about joining you and um introducing uh field apps to you today so i'm gonna share my screen um know if it's coming up okay can you all see it i'll take that as a yes i'm not seeing any people but yes um yeah so so just a that bit of introduction on me um my name is josh shaner and i'm product lead with an esri i've been at esri 20 this is my 26th year with the company surprisingly i'm only 35 i don't know how that happened it must have been a child prodigy or something totally kidding um but i used to work on our desktop products and then about nine or ten years ago i jumped over to building mobile solutions within esri so that's kind of my background in history based here out of brethren's california originally from up in a really small town uh called swift current in the province of saskatchewan in canada so uh what i thought i'd do to kick things off is kind of talk about our team and what we've been building for the last little while to set the context for field maps so what we've been doing is that we've been building technology that really looks at all the different activities that our customers use when they take content out to the field they look at you know how do they plan and coordinate the work activities that need to happen how do they efficiently get to the location of that work that needs to be accomplished how do they use maps for that spatial understanding and perhaps markup uh with graphics on top of the map how they can perform a data collection either using the map or using gps in the field how can they maintain kind of recurring i'll say inspections or observations as well that's all a part of the capture phase which we'll focus a lot on today and then something relatively new is uh which is kind of fundamental to uh to gis if you want to think about it that way is your location uh being able to record your locations so you can use that information um for historical analysis or also share it for for real-time kind of situational awareness so our team we've been building these very focused apps um to support those different activities and the really exciting thing about arcgis field maps is that we're taking all of these individual apps and we're merging them into one and we've started on that process today and we're going to just continue building upon it over the next couple of years and that's what we're going to talk about for the rest of the time here so in addition to the arcgis field maps which becomes this one app that you can use for all of these activities think about it as we have additional specialized apps apps like survey123 which a lot of you use today to do form-centric data capture we've got an app called quick capture that's really designed for that specialized activity of on the move or big button data capture we've got one called uh mission responder that's all about uh work together collaboratively collaboratively and um communicating uh geo geographically within a mobile application the arcgis indoors app which brings a lot of new capabilities for working indoor with your mobile device and arcgis earth as well that gives you that 3d perspective but at the core is is arcgis field maps and um you know one of the things i think that's really important to highlight here is the name actually um so a key fundamental i guess uh guiding principle for our team going back to this slide with all of these activities is what it's the map the map is critical to accomplishing all of these different activities and bringing them together to complete a variety of different workflows and and that's what's really important about our naming and essentially what we're doing so by authoring a map and using the arcgis platform and the principles behind it these maps just come to life on your mobile device and you can use them for all these different activities whether it's just to discover information whether it's to capture new information whether it's to validate things that are out there and you can see a little bit later that there's so much more that we're going to be bringing to okay so what's there today what have we actually released well in december we uh we released the arcgis field maps product and it combined the capabilities of arcgis explorer arcgis collector and arcgis tracker into one app and what that provides for for you is one app that you can deploy for map viewing so you can use the maps that you author inside of arcgis online or the maps that you might package with arcgis pro and just view them on the screen in your mobile device use your location for that reference and you can mark up on top of them and share that markup with others you can also use data collection capabilities in the app and we've done a lot with data collection over the last couple of years uh in that you know you can just use the map to tap and set the location for something that that you want to capture but you can go as far as connecting to an external gnss receiver define um datum transformations and capture information that can be accurate down to a centimeter so you can build upon those kind of core surveying concepts um with the data collection workflows that you employ as well and finally and and i'd say not least is the location tracking capability there's some really exciting things we've done there on the mobile device we're actually leveraging uh not just location for defining what we track but also the motion and fitness apis on the device so that we can manage battery efficiently but also capture the type of activity you're engaged in and store that with the tracks that we um collect as well so you can do some interesting analysis on the track data uh looking at the type of motion someone's engaged in doing uh the mobile app itself i've kind of talked a little bit about this already built upon the latest developer technology we have at esri it lets you view rich cartographic maps um maps that can even update in real time so if you're making web maps today you probably aware of something called a refresh interval that can be set on a layer the field maps app will honor that so if there's other things that are in motion you're going to see them change on the map as you're using it there's the ability to search in the map search with location in different coordinate notations even and that's really a powerful feature that you may or may not be aware of we can geocode so search for addresses you can search for attributes off of features we added support for indoor maps so if you followed the indoor information model that was introduced with arcgis indoors that talks about this hierarchy of sites and facilities and levels if you build map layers that support that we'll present a floor picker and show you how you can filter data based upon that indoor model that you've put together and that's just the start of some pretty exciting things we're doing there on the map markup side of things this really comes to the app from explorer so if you were a collector user you probably this is all going to be new to you you can drop markers turn them into arrows to point at things you can freehand sketch with your finger or with an apple pencil perhaps on the map uh and all that markup is stored locally on your device and you could share it by airdrop or by email or a text message or you could share it back to your arches organization and use it in pro um the high accuracy data collection capabilities that are there for our selector are all inside of field maps too and we've introduced this new smartphone capability i'm going to focus a little bit on that when i do the demonstration the other thing i wanted to mention is that with this product uh we've introduced a new web app this web app is designed really for the the gis analyst that wants to configure maps that they own uh do that in a way that all the information they need to deploy maps to a mobile device is at their fingertips so if that's managing the offline experience all of that is centralized in the app you don't have to hunt around arcgis online to find it it's the location where you can create content you can build these dynamic forms that i'm going to show you in a minute but it requires that you essentially have maps as its starting point in the future we're looking at providing an experience where you can create a new map dynamically right in this application so if you don't have the um opportunity to use uh arcgis online and create new maps um using the the tools in there or arcgis pro then you could start here and just rapidly get to uh you know building a map for say data collection purposes so that's the end of my boring slide content what i wanted to do was jump into a demo and i thought it fitting to look at actually a learn lesson that was put together by charlotte smith uh from uc berkeley and it was about evaluating equitable drinking fountain distribution um and you may or may not have had the opportunity to look at this but what i'm going to do is i'm going to go first to let me just come out of full screen mode for a second um to the exercise and let's take a look at it it's a pretty long exercise it's broken into two parts the first part is about really putting together the information required to collect data around water or water fountains ultimately uh then using arcgis collector to collect that information and then looking at uh some um information about social vulnerability to do analysis on on the distribution of those fountains so all i'm going to zero in in in on is the specific aspect of the collection um but this uh exercise this lesson's there and i encourage you to take a look at it if this is your first time uh really looking at at field maps or collector of the product as a whole one of the things that's quite interesting about it uh is that charlotte walks you through how to create a new layer so if you weren't aware of this you could start with absolutely nothing inside of arcgis online create new layers define the fields on those layers add some intelligence to the fields like lists and whatnot um and uh quickly make a map uh and this uh section of her learn lesson goes through uh how to do that uh and ultimately she creates uh two fields one that defines whether the the water fountain is functioning and uh what condition it's in um is it clean is it dirty and she walks through the details of how to do that it's really simple so i encourage you to look at if you haven't okay now uh the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to show this to you on my iphone so here is my iphone i've signed into arcgis field maps using my account and you can see a list of maps these are maps that either i'm currently working with that's the current section here maps that i've downloaded to my device um maps that i've authored or maps that have been shared with me in groups using arcgis online sharing capabilities so i'm going to tap on the berkeley fountains map and this is exactly the same workflow inside of arctis collector in fact i also have arcgis collector up here and i can show you the same the same map as we go along i'm simulating my location i'm obviously in you know i'm in redlands area i'm not in berkeley it'd be much nicer to be at this park but that's where we are today so inside of collector or inside of field maps i can tap the plus button i can drop the location it uses my current gps location for the new fountain that i'm creating and then it has a very simple form that i can fill out and two of the pieces of information are required so is the fountain functioning i can say no uh you know what's its condition it's dirty i could take a photo directly i could attach a video if i'd like record some audio browse for some file that's on my device if i want and tap submit so using field maps to collect information is really that simple now what if you want to do a little bit more what if there's more capabilities that have been enhanced over what you might do with collector let's take a look at that and i've got a different map to do that with i've got this other berkeley fountains map and i'm going to open it up uh you can see it's pointing to the same layer uh we've collected a feature there already now um what i'm going to show you is that very similar workflow i'm going to tap the plus button to collect something new um i've um augmented the the types of features that can be collected just to qualify them a bit more uh i've changed the color using different symbology very basic things i've said that you know this location this fountain is not functioning but now when we open up things are very familiar but there's more capabilities so you can see there's actually a group of information that appears now and i can collapse and expand that group so if you start to think about making much larger forms you can organize those attributes that need to be filled out using the concept of a group that can provide a descriptive information to it does the fountain work yes or no i chose no and there's two fields that appear but one that says you know why is it not working in addition to what condition is it in if i change that from node to yes that other field disappears so we can provide this additional logic inside of the forms now inside of inside of the app i can set that other attribute let's just say no and we can say when i tap on it it says you know provide details on why it's not working so i can provide some what we call hint text that helps me fill out that form so i want to know why this fountain isn't working and i can say that the tap is broken and i can add that context to it so we've got a lot of advancements that have been happening inside of the the form itself here very simple uh way to kind of move forward let me show you how i actually put that together but before i do that i want to highlight something else that's very powerful that we've introduced uh and it's right here in this custom pop-up um so i i dropped that um fountain location and in this custom pop-up that i created i am i kind of pulled from that feature and said um you know is the fountain functioning no what condition is it in sturdy but look what's next i actually um pulled directly out as i collected this feature the overall vulnerability index value and i'm displaying it you might be wondering well how could i do that the really cool thing about this is that and if you haven't spent time looking at it yet we've now introduced a new expression language in arcgis called the arcade expression language and that expression language you can use for symbolizing data you can use it for labeling features but you can also use it in your pop-ups and what i've done here is i've said take the location of the fountain go find um the actual polygon that sits for the tracks layer for the overall svi index find it and then and then derive the information of the score and present it as part of that feature so this lends itself to mapping on the phone doing basic analysis i did a point in polygon discovered the information on the related uh polygon feature pull into what i'm capturing makes the application very very powerful so i wanted to highlight that for you so how does this all um come to work so inside of your arcgis organization from the app launcher you can open up the field maps web application and when it does that i'll put it into full screen mode uh and it's going to sign in hopefully yeah here we go and show me my list of maps these are the maps that i own so again this is for the gis analyst that wants to make maps and uh configure them now in the berkeley fountains map when i click on that and i open it up i can access my content and there's my berkeley fountains layer and these are the two templates that appeared when i captured um the new location of a fountain and if i click on one of those there's lots of great things i can configure here um i've just set the default value for the field that's functioning to no but we could also set other default values for when new things are captured here too but what's i think really exciting is the form and the form aspect is here in the forms tab and it's somewhat similar to what you do with uh survey123 in that i can start to define the form itself i can take the field the fields being functioning give it a display name that asks a question give it some hint text if i want i can make it required um i can add additional intelligence to it this field of why things are not working was based upon us saying no to where the fountain works yes or no and to do that we bring forward the arcade expression language so if i click on that it opens up the expression builder and this is what my expression looked like using the functioning attribute uh and its domain name of yes or no and we can look at that if we want then just define whether it's yes or no returns back at true or false and if it's true then then show then show this value the other features in the web app really are centered around the offline capabilities knowing if the content in your map can be used offline or not and gives you a method for diagnosing why for generating what we call map area so you can essentially put together the different pieces of the map so that the person using the mobile app just taps on one to download it it's already configured for them and there's some advanced features as well so this is just a quick uh look at arcgis field maps both from the perspective of the web application in the mobile app um within our learn team at s3 we're going to be i'll just say upgrading charlotte's exercise uh her learn lesson to incorporate some of the new capabilities inside of field maps so look for that learn lesson to come pretty soon and then if you want more information there's quite a few resources that are out there obviously our you know main product page where we talk about uh the key uses of the product uh the resources page really get out to our documentation and the details of how things work we've got a great writing team that's um working on a number of key blog articles uh that also tied to guides so if you're migrating from an existing app like collector and you want to see a detailed comparison of collector to field maps that migration guide is a downloadable pdf that you can grab if you want to know all the ins and outs of the offline capabilities you can look there and then um we've been having a lot of fun with youtube we've been putting together a playlist and um highlighting individual features and we're gonna expand upon that uh quite considerably uh in the next little while so i think that's really all i have um for content i'm gonna pass it back to you and sarah and serena three okay thank you jeff we have a lot of questions for you here and but it's by the way it's great presentations so if i see that it seems like there's a lot more capabilities in the field maps that seamless together and working together um there's the first question in here is does the user still need to can still use the classic arcgis collector or what is the best practice yeah yeah so with um with our transition what we're doing from a development perspective is all new development that we um engage in is happening inside of field maps but collector is still supported it's going to be supported through the end of 2021 um and then we're hoping that all these new features that we've been introducing will help you migrate to field maps and in a big part of it um just to kind of maybe ease some concerns is that the code base we started with for field maps was collector's code base so everything migrating right it's basically everything that you work in at collectors should work in the field map exactly and then more and the one thing to maybe look at there is um is especially for you as a gis professional um or a gis analyst that makes a bunch of maps because we've merged explorer and collector together your list of maps that appears when you sign in could be longer um it could have maps that are read-only as well as maps that you can collect didn't do and in that web app we've got a way for you to filter out maps that you don't want to see there there's a show in field maps or hide in field maps i didn't show you that in the app but um there's that capability that's really the only thing that ultimately is is different in the experience and the form as well it's actually smart form similar with the survey one two three that you have in collector in in the field map yeah the the exciting thing there and i should have showed this i can break it back out and show it to you is that you know what's really important for us in our team and what we do is that everything is centered around the map so the smart form work that we're doing isn't unique to field maps if you use the new map viewer beta those smart forms work there too because we've been working with our javascript development team with the arcgis online development team and the form itself is a i'll just say a new piece of json that gets written into the web map and so this march the map viewer that's in beta will be released and uh if you use it to edit features that same smart form appears there as it appears in the field maps app and then um moving forward we're going to teach pro how to work with that smart form definition as well so it's one that's kind of expanding as a a new form of no pun intended they're working with and editing attribute data inside the platform and you can think of it as a new arcgis smart forms definition where what we did with um with surveys is incredible it's based upon an open standard called xls forms and that team will continue to iterate on the xls form spec now we just have an arcgis spec as well i see there's a question in here jeff could you change the setting to that when you open the new map in field map it's zoomed to the map data instead of automatically centering on your location uh that's that's been um a really interesting uh question for us as a team because you know you set a default extent for the map um and if the map supports data collection um inside of field maps and we zoom to your location with the thought that that's where you're going to capture data or you're going to be there that's when you're using it but if you don't support data collection in the map then let's just default to the extent of the map uh and it's kind of an ongoing debate uh within within our team actually um we have lots of heated debates by the way but uh it's great feedback um it'd be good to understand if that's from the perspective of wanting to teach with it and not being at the location or if it's something else um if it's from the perspective of teaching um what i'm gonna do i'm just gonna and i'll try to be pretty quick on this i'm gonna show you some hidden developer functionality inside of the app uh so let me go here and this is currently specific to the ios app we'll be adding it to android soon but if i go into my profile you can see also that you know as i'm tapping there's that pulse that's showing right um so what i'm gonna do here uh and it's gonna sound a bit crazy over top of the name uh i'm gonna tap three times really quickly one two three i'm gonna do it again one two three when i tap three times you might have noticed it on the bottom of the screen there's a developer menu that actually appeared with the developer menu i can simulate location and i paste it in a coordinate right there so i can set that coordinate and i could do it quite easily i can basically just go in a map um let's go over here we'll drop a pin we'll copy the coordinates we'll go back over we'll tap developer we'll tap here and we'll paste and uh man look at all the other attributes i could say that we're accurate to 0.5 of a meter and when i come back into the map my location just moved and i'm there so this is a nice tool for teaching now i wouldn't recommend that you try to go outside afterwards because you're going to go wait i'm not there you know and it's not going to track so you're going to want to shut that off but know that that's available for you if you want to use it for teaching and um uh and what i've done with to show this is to turn on show touches so there's a little insider tip wow this is a treat that you give us to the background back you know um yeah for the setting or for the developer here so any of you that you you're probably teaching with the data outside the country then now you can you can do that right you do it for the demo as well uh the way on android right now is is quite convoluted you pretty much you need to use what's called mock locations um and simulate a location that way or if you want to simulate android altogether you can use android studio and then you can set a location within a property in android studio if you want to go that route awesome jeff we have another question here i think this is from stace how well does uh fill um field maps handle or edit related table record yeah actually really well let me open up since i'm still sharing my screen i'm going to open up a completely different map and show you real quick here i've got um let's see is this the one that i wanted to show things are looking kind of weird someone was in here editing this data i've got a hydrant and this hydrant has a related table for inspections and you can see hydra inspections is listed there if i tap hydrant inspections and i can add a new related record and that form that i talked about that new smart form works on related tables too so in this case i've got multiple groups uh and i've got this conditional logic i'll say yes here um it's got required field i don't know what flow rate is on a on a flush tube hydrant but i'll just put a value in there and hit submit so we can definitely support related tables and then uh you know uh using using some of that arcade logic uh you could go down through the related tables and pull out kind of interesting uh information that way and related tables inside of field maps i you know i think it's it's a really um it's uh underrated because the other thing that you can support so you can support a like in this case it was a one-to-many relationship between uh a feature and a non-spatial table but you can do feature to feature relationships too so i was just working with the fire department that was looking at addresses and they wanted to actually tap on an address and then be able to create at that address at the location of a smoke alarm or an entry point or other features that were related back to the address so that they didn't have to enter any address information so you can using arcgis pro to find these feature to feature relationships and they'll all just work in site of field maps as well jeff follow up a bit here does it support laser range finder offsets we do not have direct laser rangefinder offset capability today we have been working with some partners on that though um so i'm going to [Music] open up a tab and i'm going to go to one of these partner websites eos positioning so eos positioning sells uh gps receivers high accuracy gps receivers they're based out of montreal canada and they have a laser mapping solution and a locate solution the locate actually integrates with field maps to do underground line location um like the finding the depth of uh you know a water line that's under the ground uh and from the laser mapping perspective if i can click on that and get it to come up they've introduced some you know i would say pretty advanced survey methods by using field maps connected to their application on the device things like a range range intersect method and there's some great videos here joseph by the way i mean this is next level for you doing mobile demos this uh this person here tyler uh actually shares his screen has a video camera behind him and is recording his collection with offsets and talking at the same time as showing a screen next level stuff range back sighting and a lot of other methods that are there that are more kind of traditional survey methods but available through um through field maps and collector by the way so we haven't introduced laser offsets ourself yet we've kind of been working with partners to do that and this is a good example of one that we've worked with to do it awesome hey joseph do you have these are great jeff they're just pouring in because uh people are loving this and and really wanting to dig into this many in our community in our education community uh globally use uh survey123 in part because of the crowdsourcing uh capability where you know a person doesn't have to be signed in or anything like that what is the thinking with the field maps and and and crowdsourcing uh you know that's a good question um from a sourcing perspective um we don't have so much of a direction there i'd say that you know where we've um because what's what's critical for data collection within field maps is the identity uh so we need to get an idea of some sort so where we have seen the crowdsourcing aspect come come in uh is with organizations that use arcgis hub premium um and then uh you know inside of hub premium uh you can get a bulk of users that can be uh assigned to do uh data collection exercises so it's not crowdsourcing there's no uh ability to collect information inside the app without some form of identity it could be a social identity like we've added support for signing with apple or with um i think it's face whatever the social uh ones that we support are okay but you need to establish some kind of identity to use it um got it so the people that want to truly make a crowdsource kind of a field survey survey123 is the is the way to go on that yeah understood i think i think it's the only solution we have today for it yes yep okay here's another one uh reena sorry i've done you have stacked as well but uh one of our colleagues i've wondered this myself um is wondering how do you you know you get this you get this list of maps in your mobile device how do you easily remove those so they don't show up in the field maps interface if that makes sense you've got a bunch of content you don't want it all to show totally does uh let me go back to where i had the the web page um i am going to go back to this overview page here in the web app there's two ways to do it one is you can use this web app to do it um the other is it it's just a property on a web map inside of arcgis online so if i didn't want to show this these other maps i can click on them and say hide in field maps mobile you see i did that now if i come back over to the mobile app um and i refresh my screen those maps are gone sweet they don't show up in the map yeah and and so so likewise if i if i wanted to just do that from the item details i can go over to my content um and we do have a if you want to automate that there's a python script for it too if you want to get all fancy but if i go and this is another reason why we built this web app i need to go to the actual web map item i need to go over to the settings and then right down at the bottom i can remove use for collector i could remove use for field maps mobile app so right there thank you so two ways to do it yep hey uh jf question here any plan to release field maps for windows tablet such as the surface pro yeah we've been looking at it you know we've been dabbling in the windows platform a lot and we've built explorer most recently for windows but we haven't engaged in building field maps on the windows platform and there's a couple of reasons for that one has been a kind of a lack of adoption of windows as a whole for mobile use when you look at um what we actually developed we built an app that's focused on a touch-centric user experience for phone and tablet form factors and a while ago microsoft introduced that concept but in the last couple of years they've kind of moved away from building developer toolkits that provide that experience there was a recent announcement and we don't know for sure if it's rumor or if it's fact um but uh we're expecting to hear potentially more at microsoft's build conference about being able to run uh android apps on on the uh on the windows 10 platform and if that's the case well field maps will just work potentially right so we want to investigate uh more opportunities like that before we move forward on windows uh interestingly enough if you follow like obviously here i'm on a mac if you follow some of apple's development um the new silicone chip based macs run ios apps and i've been testing a new this one that i'm sharing with isn't a silicone mac but i've been testing on one and field maps works really well the only thing we haven't figured out yet is how to work with external gps receivers but everything else just runs like a champ on it i see okay uh another question in here is does the form in arcgis field maps work only for hosted feature services what if you want to work with the data that is coming from a database yes it works with both hosted services but as well as arcgis server um feature services and and that's what i was saying with the form itself being stored not as a part of the layer or its definition but as a part of the web map and if you really want to dive into it i'm sure we can share some links after too but this is the spec and this is the web map spec and this is the current form info spec so if you want to go dive into the json you can see it there this json can be applied to any feature layer whether it come from you know your enterprise geodatabase originally been served up as a feature service or if it's a hosted feature layer so both work and tables too joseph go ahead i think you have some questions right i do i think i've got one that uh i think many people will care about um and these are great questions folks by the way okay let's say we want to add a record um or a field in in the table rather than adding a new geometry can we first of all if i understand the question correctly can we add a field inside the field maps app like let's say you're out in the field you know oops i forgot conductivity or something like that and maybe yeah yeah maybe andy can rephrase or clarify my i think i that one joseph it's really it's really about um on the fly and this was supported a long time ago with um arc pad arc pad didn't really have uh you know a strong web i mean it was built before we really had web gis right it was a standalone thing you could create a new uh project in our pad it would define and there was one thing called a quick project where you could just instantly have a set of fields um and cash to take into the field because you might have forgot you know to set up something up front before you went out to the field we've we've not done anything like that since um what we generally recommend is that you just go in maybe use arcgis online here and go to your content view and this is where charlotte's lesson starts click create feature layer and then we have a build a layer concept you can create empty point line or polygon feature layers you can start adding fields to them but keep them as like this generic layer that's added into your maps it can be used to capture other things that's really nice the only thing we can do today for it yeah thank you um jeff that's not a question related again to the relation table relay table here will the field match support many to many relationship with the related tables we don't today um you know it's something that we have looked at um we drive like again we drive the uh definition of the relationship work based upon what's supported in the feature service and today that's not um supported in the way that we can use it so if there's some good use cases on that we'd love to get them because there's a lot of future development around relationship classes we want to do so if we could get some examples of many to many relationships that you you can explain from the benefit of a mobile user love to get that yes okay so there's another question in here is will field map support geo id models of true orthometric elevation using high accuracy external receivers such as trimble r1 and r2 that's a great question so one of the things that we've done with field maps and we've kind of done this with with all the other um vendors too is that you know there's always if it's a trimble r series receivers or whatnot there's always a companion app that comes from the vendor like the eos company i showed you they have an eos tools pro app that's what does the laser offsetting with trimble they've got this app called trimble mobile manager and what's unique to field maps which is really cool um is that we uh in with trimble receivers we actually embed uh a software development kit from trimble as part of it and it's called the tp sdk and that is used by the trimble mobile manager so through the combination of the two within field maps not only do we have support for true orthometric heights but also support for time dependent transformations and that's kind of unique to working with trimble-based receivers in the case of working with eos or leica they also provide us with an orthometric height and we store that into the z value of the geometry we also capture as an attribute the height above ellipsoid so you have both and you could compare or do your own math on it so all of it's there what we don't have yet is a way for you to define uh and store just natively inside of field maps and a more accurate geoid and define that vertical datum transformation and that's in our roadmap to do but right now we're just working with the vendors to support that feature but look for it um it's kind of in our mid to long term all right thank you jeff well this is a lot of questions exciting all right next one how well does it sink if multiple people are collecting data offline yeah so um well that's there's a there's a bunch of things to go with that like oh gosh i try to be brief i get so excited about this if i want to spend a lot of time talking about it an organization that uh is here in california that uses um our offline capabilities quite extensively as calfire and we've done a lot of work with cal fire to kind of improve the overall synchronization framework that's inside of arcgis because you know in their workflows or they're say doing damage assessments on a on a wildfire they go back to their command center which could have just a simple wifi that they need to sync against and we encountered some situations where you know you'd have six firefighters coming connecting to a wifi each of them having like 20 pictures on their phone along with want to think at the same time and it just has caused catastrophic failure right because you're all at this choke point of a wifi you've got lots of packets of data you're trying to upload you're all hammering it at the same time um so we've done a lot of optimizations for that on the mobile device first is that you know we don't upload anything that's larger than two megabytes in packets um and size will chunk everything up so that we can essentially stream it up to a server and whether that's uh you know our servers uh in arcgis online or whether that's your servers and your enterprise installation uh and in that case you need to think about how you manage scale them the other part is that we've added advanced capabilities for how you manage the download aspect going back to that cal fire example uh the sync by default is bi-directional kind of like your email right so i compose a bunch of emails i upload and i download at the same time well if i'm downloading a bunch of gis features with attachments and those are all big photos it's going to take a long time and it's going to put a lot of stress on that that network um uh for for it being a high uh high bandwidth network so you can make all kind of optimizations on how the sync should occur and that really alters the experience so i could say only download gis features never download any photo attachments never download features only just upload data as i've captured it in all of these different settings has a dramatic impact on the overall synchronization capabilities so we try to talk through a lot of that on the offline migration guide and i encourage you to look at that to better understand how the synchronization framework works and how you can optimize it hopefully that was an answer to the question i kind of went off there uh jeff i'm just looking at the chat here again and there are some appreciative comments about hey i've been using collector for a long time we all know that these educators want to get their students out in the field and collecting data and so on and others that are not educators that happen to be on here as well but that's very much appreciated and i think you touched on that when you talked about using the code base that you didn't want to make people hey you've got this system in place or you've got a course that you're teaching you're working for a municipal government you don't have to reinvent everything that you've done so and again lots of positive comments about that awesome uh jeff um how about um development extensibility options available in the work with arcgis with this field map yeah you know the approach that we've taken is one that's more centered on configuration than it is extending the capabilities um so we don't provide the code base through kind of open source at all and there's been no intention or no intent to do that with our team instead there's a couple of different ways that you can integrate with it we have a concept of app linking that both our partners and uh developers and and others have kind of taken flight with it's basically being able to remotely control the application using a url extremely powerful it's how that eos company integrates the laser range finding you could say i have to launch the field maps application i want to pass it a bunch of data and i want to tell it to start capturing a new feature and use that data that i pass or open up a specific map or you know there's like a a myriad of different features that can be uh leveraged that way we're also um with the web app going to introduce the concept of map settings and map settings will let you control what's available in the user experience so if i don't want someone to be able to use the compass to navigate to the location of a feature or if i don't want them to be able to copy an existing feature you could turn that off at the map level and it'll configure the user experience on the device so our intent with the um with the product is more to focus on you configuring rather than going through the process of customizing because the bar goes from really low um to extremely high once you get the source code in swift or kotlin and want to build for a specific deployment you need a developer agreement um you need to understand our code base you need to be very fluent in that language and most of the customers that use our products they don't want that so we haven't gone that route awesome hey jeff there's a quick question in here can can can you import survey one two three x xls forms into uh field uh maps or do do you need to recreate them you would need to recreate them again uh the two products are going to live side by side so so don't don't uh think that survey 123 is going anywhere it's going to continue to expand and grow if you want to um build forms that maybe you've built and survey and use them in field maps you'll need to build them over again though it's a completely different format and it's founded upon you kind of starting with an existing schema in in march we'll be releasing a python api for creating forms too so you could look at how could i automate that using python like diving into a survey form and then creating it programmatically so that that will be possible but from a designer experience you'd have to start over awesome okay so there's a lot more uh questions and comments jeff that we do not have time to cover here but i think we're gonna plan to do to write an faq maybe so they can always go back and then check that faq awesome um joseph is there anything that i miss i and i know i miss a lot well given the the wonderful uh comments and and feedback in the chat box someone's asking about can we save that are there any are there any issues with doing that rina do you know yes save the chat um there's so many people with the information here i don't know i need to get probably approval for it yeah maybe we could strip out the names yeah put the links in there or something like that right another another thought for you guys too yeah i think that's where you're going is um i'm happy to take any questions that didn't get answered or even summarizing the ones that we did verbally answer uh into an article um you know one you could post on to the geonet community or whatever it might be because i'd love to see field maps be a strong teaching tool so the more i can support you in any way i'd love to do it yes yes yes let's do that jeff of i think that document can be just like frequently asked questions and we give you the list from the chat awesome so it will look nice anyway so um one one minute to go and we would like to thank you everyone for coming we would like to thank jeff for sure for answering all the questions and then uh don't forget the next march one we're gonna bring arcgis urban so that will be that will be a nice one and if i can open the um my screen here again i just want to show the the site for the um i don't know i couldn't find the site for the chat here okay here you go the registration is open is exploring urban informant with arcgis urban so uh feel free to join okay thank you everyone um jeff and uh joseph do you have the last minute uh thanks jeff thanks rina thanks everyone awesome thank you for the opportunity appreciate it you

Channel: Esri Industries

Views: 5,403

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Esri, ArcGIS, GIS, Geographic Information System, ArcGIS Pro, higher education

Id: 65rn_D1xsps

Length: 59min 57sec (3597 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021