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Origin

Collection of site survey and installation information can be quite challenging. When teams of any size need to collect and combine information from techs in the field (ie: IDF name, number of switches, etc), they often start by leveraging familiar tools.

These tools can range from pre-formatted emails, templated rich-text documents (ie: Microsoft Word), or even structured data formats like spreadsheets. Maintenance and collaboration becomes quite cumbersome with the following types of data collection:

  • Media (photo) capture
  • Updating templates and inputs
  • Maintaining data consistency
  • Combining multiple sources
  • End-user visibility
  • Built-in context
  • Cross-referencing related information

Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets can present inputs to fill out information, but they can't properly contain photos. It becomes difficult to update the spreadsheet template and send it out to a large team, and when each team member has their own copy of the spreadsheet, all that data needs to be manually combined.

The next best solution might be web forms like those from Jotform, Smartsheets, or Google Forms. Web forms work well for most of the requirements, they can:

  • Capture media (photos)
  • Make updating the template easy
  • Enforce very consistent data
  • Require no manual combining of sources

Where web forms fall short is in the last three requirements: End-user visibility, built-in context, and cross-referencing of related information.

End-user visibility

Web form services allow a user to submit all the data requested in the form, but they don't allow that same user to view what has already been submitted. This becomes problematic when trying to keep track of progress, or when a user wants to look back at previously submitted data for reference.

Built-in context

Submission of general web forms will always require repetitive or contextual information to be submitted alongside the truly interesting information. For example, a basic IDF survey form could contain the following inputs:

Name:

Contact Phone or Email:

Site Name:

IDF Name:

Rack Count:

A surveyor visiting IDFs within a single site would repetitively input the same information for the first three inputs in this form (name, contact, site name).

When installers visit the same location multiple times throughout the stages of a project (ie, survey, installation, QA), they submit a new web form during each visit. Information from each stage then has to be manually combined together to form a wholistic view of submitted data for a specific location.