Mobile Workforce Location Tracking with Bing Maps
All. Right thanks. Everybody. Good. Afternoon. In, this session we're gonna take a look at the. Bing. Maps fleet, tracker which we released as open source, in. January. And will show you how to deploy it how to build it all that good stuff and periodically. We'll switch and take, a look at my colleague, Eric here it. Looks like he's broken down at the side of the road right now I know that timestamp is about two, minutes ago but we'll, we'll check in on him periodically, I asked him if he would drive around while we were doing, our session. So. I'm gonna start with a really quick, look, at the Bing Maps platform, itself how many of you have used Bing, Maps API over, the years, and. A few hands okay so. We're gonna focus mostly on the, new api's for, mobility and fleet, management today but I wanted to just give you a very quick look, at. Some of the other capabilities of the platform because it's important to know as you're building your geospatial. Applications, for. Fleet, management, and mobile field workforces, you've got the rest of these capabilities, at your disposal so of course we do we've. Got a JavaScript, map control, and we've got a Windows 10 map control, which is pre-installed, on every Windows 10 device we've, got rest api's that, work from any environment, excuse. Me. And basically. Everything, you need to build your geospatial. Applications, great data visualization. We. Work in over 150, countries. Map. Rendering geocoding. Traffic. Services. Reverse. Geocoding, all that good stuff and of course world-class, developer, support I think this is really one of the things that sets us apart is great, documentation, and great developer support with all of our mapping, api's, so. Here's a look at some of the capabilities, of the JavaScript map control, I mentioned. Really. Good data visualizations, whether, you're pulling data in from sequel, database or some other data source will, help you draw heat maps shaded. Area maps with just a couple lines of code we, can pull in, data. From industry, standard files like, KML. Files, we've. Got great imagery as well like aerial, imagery bird's-eye, imagery 45. Flown, over flyover. Imagery, as well. All. Right so that's our very quick recap so. Let's look at some of the new capabilities, that. Might be of interest to you we added four. New api's over, the last few months in time, for build truck, routing is one, of the most popular, this one's really taken off for us since we launched it because, there's not a lot of other folks in the industry offering. This one and, it's exactly what you think it is trucks, can't go where cars can go at all times so if you're use if your truck driver and you're driving a bucket truck and you're. Using consumer-grade, routing.
You're Gonna end up in a situation like this where you're going over a low, under, low bridge on. This API we support things like all the dimensions, of a truck height with loaded, weight number, of axles will, also support things like, hazardous. Material, hauling, things of that nature, and. Here's. A couple visual examples, of low. Bridges I like this one, you. Got the car out here going through this tunnel but in this case I said hey I'm hauling flammable, materials, and I can't go through that tunnel so I've got to take this detour, and. Then head through. Distance. Matrix is another great API very powerful, for fleets think, of this as many-to-many routing, where I've got many. Origins. And many destinations maybe, I've got three commercial, bakeries, and I need to deliver everyday to 150. Supermarkets, and I want to do load balancing among my bakeries, this, is a great API for that single API call, you pass all, of those locations in you'll get back a matrix, of times, and, distances you. Can then operate on that matrix and, do, things like solve the Traveling Salesman problem and, optimize. Where your. Fleet should be going huge, cost savings, in time and fuels for large fleets, this, is one of my favorites the isochrone, api think of this is how. Far can i drive in, a given amount of time so, here, we're looking at seattle, and we've got four, concentric. Locations, and these were created at 10 15 20, and 25, minutes so from the middle of sea. That's, how far I can get so what decides. Drawing pretty pictures what, can you do with this you. Can use it for spatial, filtering of queries where you say well, I only want to see properties, that are within a 20-minute, commute of my. Work location, it's a really good example and another, one that we'll look at in a minute is geofence, creation, because when we look at our fleet tracker we'll show you how to create geo fences to detect when someone, enters or leaves an area we'll show you how to draw an area on the map but, wouldn't it be cool if you said hey I've got a warehouse and I want to create a geofence, that is 20 minutes around that warehouse so that whenever, I've got a delivery coming, in I get a 20 minute alert so I retool, the. Receiving. Dock for that particular, shipment so it's a that's another great use case and the, last oh I have a just a quick, image showing you how to do spatial, filtering so here I've got a lot of random points, representing, properties, but, then I generated, my isochrone, from, my, office here in Bellevue I've got, a 15-minute, drive time, and now, I can, very, quickly iterate, through those points and know who's inside, or outside of, that. Drive time zone, now. We get to our final. API. That we release this is our snap to Road API what, this does is it takes. A series, of GPS. Coordinates, which as you know can be very inexact, and it, will intelligently. Interpolate, and snap them on to the road network and return, for you the. Actual route and with. The actual route you'll get a lot of interesting Street attributes. Speed, limit is a really important one posted, speed limit a lot of companies use this for post, drive analytics, where they've, got historic, GPS trails for their drivers, and now they want to know like okay I know where the guy was going but was he within the speed limit so they can run, their GPS.
Trail Through this API get the speed limits back and then know how. The driver was doing, okay. So, with that now we're gonna move on to the, heart of what we want to talk about and that is the fleet, tracker let's. Just, see if Erica's moved. Check. In on him yep so he is. He. Is cruising it looks like we got him. 26, just a couple minutes ago. All right, so. We released this in January as an open source project and in a moment I'll give, you the link of where you can go and grab all of this code there's really two major, chunks, of this we've got the client application which. Runs on iOS and Android and. Of course all the sources provided, we provide it compiled, but you can grab it and edit, it and tailor. It recompile. It and deploy it for your organization. And. The, app is really lightweight we built it to be battery friendly, and it, really does just one thing it shows you a map of where you are but it's sending location backup to the service, and that's the other part of this project is you get the azure, back-end so in that back-end when you deploy it it'll stub out your storage, it gives, you this nice dashboard, and. It gives you all the services, running in the background that will break down in, a moment and take a look at so. What are the some, of the features that you get after you deploy this again. You know the most important one is it's open source so these features are what we give you right out-of-the-box but we we have dozens. Of developers, have started using this and adding, to the project, already so, geo-fenced, alerts, is a. Great one we show you how to interactively, draw, a geofence, and. Then set an alert through email or text message whenever, a driver enters, or exits that area trip. And location, detection is very interesting, so we have a service it runs in the background and it's always analyzing, the points as they come in and it'll try to figure out where, did this driver stop, and we'll call that a location, and what, are all the points that made up a contiguous, trip, and. That's that plays in with the reporting, that's built in as well you can get daily, weekly, monthly reports. Of. Activity. Of. All the drivers in your in. Your deployment and, one of my favorites is the fact that we make it really easy to add. Your devices I'm going to show you how, by. Shooting a QR code from, the app on the phone you're, tying that. Phone to an instance, your private, instance, of the application, so you don't have to do, a lot of manual configuration. It's just a QR code and you're up and running so. Let's. Let's cut back over, to our demo, and. I'll. Show you a few more features, so now there's. Eric, cruising, along now. If i zoom way out. There. We go so I've got three three, drivers in my fleet these are my. Colleagues, this is Justin. You can see his time stamp is old he turned on his phone for me when he was on vacation in, New Orleans and I'm. Off right now but, I was up there up, here I should say in in. Seattle. Now, I can, for, me I'm, going, to click. On my trails. This. Is gonna pull in all of what. You'll see now is my, trips, I, left, my phone. On my GPS when I was flying a couple of weeks ago so that's what that long one, is but I'm gonna zoom back in here to Seattle. And. Over. This time interval dead there's a lot of data there so I'm gonna go back to a one month view there we go that simplifies, things. Now. You get a nice, boring look. At my life this is where I work and. This. Is where, I live and you can see that over the month, period, I didn't do a whole lot here when, that's. I know, I see my manager, back there I want him to think that, I am always in the office I'm either home or I'm at work and that is that, is it. So, let's. I'm gonna show you now how to add your. Device so if you've deployed, your application. I'll show you how to deploy this in a moment but assuming you've deployed it now you've got the application on your handsets, I'm, gonna add someone so I'm gonna go in here and look, at my devices. I'm gonna hit the Add button and, if. I was thinking ahead what I would have had one of you do is install, the application, while you're sitting here someone could have shot that QR code and then gone, running outside to, prove. That it was everything, was hooked up and working in real time so that's how simple it is to add. A, device, into the system or you could go into.
Your Phone settings and you can get these values and, add them manually but it's a lot nicer if you can just, shoot the QR. Code so. How to deploy. This that's the next thing we're gonna look at, like. I said we've made it, pretty. Easy so all of our code is up on github and you can take that project. You can download and compile it and deploy, yourself, but, what I really love is we've, created a, one-click. Deployment. Portal and I'm gonna show you that right now and this. Basically, lets you sign in with your Azure. Account choose, your, choose. Your deployment, and hit. Publish and you'll be up and running in no time so. So. Here's our art github where you get your source and documentation. And, like I said you can also grab the compiled, applications. Out of here as well if you don't want to build, the iOS, or Android. Application, and then down here is the link for our. Deployment. Portal which I've got open in another window. And. This. Is it so if I want to deploy now I come in here I'm, gonna give it a name I. Choose. My Azure, subscription oh. Wait. Not, a valid name I think it's cuz I have a space in there. Yeah. That's a valid name. There. We go alright, so I choose my Azure. Subscription. Choose, the region I want to deploy, to I, have, to give it a Bing Maps subscription. Key so many of you probably have a Bing Maps key already, but if not it's free to get one and you just come over to. Bing. Maps portal comm and that's where you sign them with your Microsoft account grab, a developer, key, there's. No charge to do so you get a hundred twenty-five thousand. Year. At. No charge and, you'll plug that key in. Back. Here. Then. You'll grab an. Application. ID and you. Go to the Microsoft application. Portal to do that and you, can see I've previously. Created. One fleet tracker test to I grabbed, my ID and, my secret, and I'm gonna paste those back in at the deployment, portal whoops. And. Then. Finally this, last value is optional, and this, is if you're going to take advantage of the, alerts now we the, code as we ship it uses, an, email gateway called send grid so if you happen to have a send grid account you can pop it in there but, like I said that's optional, you don't have to use send grid you can go into the code and maybe. You prefer to use your own mail gateway or send a text message instead, of an email or do whatever you want but all the hooks are in the code to do that and that's it once I've done all that I hit, the deploy button which I'm not going to do right now you'll get a little wait cursor ten minutes later you, are deployed and you're live. With. Your basically, everything that I just showed you. And. I. Think. That was the, last official. Slide, I have a great. How do I get started, and. Really the only URL. That you have to remember is this, one everything, else is linked, off of it so this is our developer, portal Bing Maps portal, comm there, you'll find our interactive SDK, our documentation, on. MSDN. All. Of our marketing materials, all, good stuff, so. That. Was pretty good I blew through that about, five minutes faster. Than I thought I would so, I can actually take some questions right now we've got brochures, up here we, also have a session across. The street in the Sheridan, at. Four, o'clock today and, in that session if you want to join us over there we'll, look at this a little, bit but we're mostly going to focus on the rest of the api's that we just kind of blew through at the beginning so it'll be more of a broad mapping, overview we're going to look at some customer, applications. And. We'll, look at some interesting, and unique things that customers are doing and we'll show you the code and how to do that with our mapping, api's.
Alright. Any questions. Yeah. I'll. Repeat, the question. The. Mobile app yeah. So the question, is does. The mobile app that we built run in the background so yes it does it doesn't have to be up in the foreground as a matter of fact when I've got it installed, and running I really. Never looked at it the only UI. Option, in it is for the person who has the phone to toggle their location, on or off but, other than that it shows you a map with a dot of where you are and that's. It so it can totally be running in the background and, that's. Definitely true for Android I believe that's true for iOS I'm getting a nod from, our dev, lead in the back so yes it's true for both. Any. Other questions. One. Thing I'll point out you. Know we usually tell folks oh it's, really built for small to mid-size fleets, and but. There's really no reason that this can't scale. Up to thousands. And thousands, of people. We say small to mid-size because, most people with, fleets. Of thousands. Have more specialized, needs and they're probably already using an off-the-shelf, system, already so that's the only reason that we say, small. To mid-size other than that it there's really no limit to the scalability, and, how many people you could have in there so and the reason I wanted to point that out is, many. Of our customers they've started taking a look at this it might be someone like a regional. Delivery company, where they've got 20 trucks in an area this is great for them to get started but we've been talking to a lot of organizations, that have mobile workforces, that might not be in trucking, or fleet, but, their mobile. Sales force and they might have hundreds. Or thousands. On. Cellphone location they want to be able to see where people are and coordinate, meetings it's great for that as well so don't, necessarily, think pure, trucking. Applications. But any kind of mobile workforce where you need to see, where your people are in real-time it's really appropriate for that. Any. Other questions I think we got I, know what's the time check. What. Do you got. 16. Yeah we got we have three minutes to go so. I'll, let you all go go, early if there's no more questions but oh. So. A question, is we give, you 125 thousand, transactions, what is a transaction, so, any. API call that you make against. The Bing Maps API is counts, as a transaction, now we're. Pretty liberal though in when. You load our map control, we call that one transaction, once, that map control loads you can do an awful lot within that session so the session is really one transaction. But, if you're using our REST API every. Time you make a call for say driving directions or address, lookup that would also be one transaction, but if you're doing it within the context, of our map control, that's all included in, the loading, of the map control so. Oh. Man. Yeah definitely so back, at the beginning and, I'll, slide my slides way, up to the front here and. It's, a great question to tie back to what we talked about early, on, sitting. Underneath all of this is the. The, Bing Maps for enterprise platform so, that we've been working on this for two decades we, have a boatload of capabilities. And one, of them is heat maps so we've, made it really easy and. You can stop by our booth and I'll show you some demos just on heat maps but it's really easy to feed data in and. You. Know one line of code and you've got a heat map coming out so yeah and there, is one thing I didn't show in the application. Because I was moving quickly but I'll pop back and show, you the app we've. Got quite a bit of reporting built in, we. Don't have a heat map but. I can do things like. Trip. Duration and, there's only a few people in. My sample, deployment. Here so I only have a couple of bars. But. This is all since all the data is being stored back in your private, as your instance the. Reporting. That we give you out of the box is hooked up to that. Any. Other. Questions. Yeah. It's it's, 125,000. For free so the question was when, you go to production when, you're coming out of a preview. Do. Does. Your allocation, of transactions. Still, yes you can take those with you and go to production it's when you exceed, 125,000. That will start to charge you for that and pricing. Starts at about 50. Cents per thousand, if you're a high-volume customer, the price per thousand, ramps down very quickly but that would be the starting, price Oh. Route. Optimisation. You missed the beginning then that's, all right so. Actually, and it's a it's a great question because I only touched on it ever so quickly so we talked about our distance matrix API which. Can help with route optimisation, but we are actually in, the next 2 months 2 to 3 months I. Wonder. If I should be announcing this at build because it's not out yet but I'll just I'll say. It because it's so close to coming out we are releasing route optimization.
And What that basically means is when, you call our routing API today you pass in a bunch of waypoints and we will return the directions, in the order that you pass them in but now there will be an optimized flag so you could say ok I got I need, to go from A to B to C to D or, those are the stops I need to make reorder, them based on. Optimal. Driving. Rules consider traffic, when we do that as well so that is coming soon but we did earlier look at our distance matrix API which would help you do that today but, you got to write a lot more code we're, gonna roll all of that up into our API. Any. Other questions. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Virtual earth yeah. Yep. Yeah. We do we have something similar the question was do we have something similar to Google Earth where you can zoom, out and see the whole earth we do and, it's much, like Google Earth it is a heavier, weight application. So it runs on Windows and, if you have a Windows 10 machine its pre-installed, so just. Look for the Maps app and we, do 3d, mapping and, as, a matter of fact since we're sitting. In front of a computer. I'll. Just, pop it up. And you, can zoom out and see the whole earth and I, think. I'm on a slow, connection these buildings should start to they're all colored and shaded not they're not just white. Silhouettes. But. Yeah so we've we've got that too it's a separate API, but, it's very well documented, it's. Similar, to our JavaScript, API but, it's a little bit different and the capabilities, are a little bit different as well but that's another option for developers. And, you'll. Get to that if, you want to learn about that it's at the same place the, Bing Maps portal, is the place to go for that. Any. Other questions. All. Right well thanks everybody so we've got another session at 4:00, 4:00. O'clock across the street if you want to pop over for that and. Our booth is all the way down across, from Theodore, too if you have any questions, and, you want to stop by and get a more, hands-on. Look well thank you very much for your time I appreciate it.
2018-07-18 07:26
