Esri needs to check out GoCanvas: Mobile Business Apps and Forms on Android, iPad, iPhone . It blows Survey 123 almost completely away.* Yes, S123 can capture photos, has cascading fields with drop down choices, and has a GUI for designing forms on the web. But if you want to get fancy with your form, you have to learn how to use S123 Connect. GoCanvas is one of many mobile field collection solutions but it is more capable, has more features, and is more flexible than S123.
GoCancas is totally a GUI for designing forms. It has:
1) Fields that auto-calculate.
2) You can take photos and then DRAW ON THEM.
3) Set up If/Thens for turning on entire pages of questions.
4) Upload reference data that can be used to drill down to narrow choices as you go through a set of questions.
5) Reference photos can be uploaded and then drawn on. For instance, if you do a damage assessment for baseball fields, you can upload a template outline of a baseball field and then draw on it with different colors to highlight damage or make notes.
6) OFFLINE capability. Take the form into the field, collect your data and sync later.
7) Collect coordinates and include as a map or set of x,y in your report.
😎 Automatically generate PDF reports, standard or designed with their PDF designer.
AND
9) Automatically submit reports to a connect cloud storage like Dropbox or Google Drive.
10) Workforce and dispatching capabilities.
11) API's to connect to a database or other web platforms such as Quickbase.
12) And this could all feed into a web GIS with a bit of programming.
I have used GoCanvas for the past year for damage assessments and inspections; it has proven to be almost infinitely flexible as requirements change on a daily or weekly basis. It is our go-to for field data collection. Esri must either match the capabilities of GoCanvas (and save us from spending tens of thousands of dollars on another application), buy the GoCanvas company, or fall behind this competition.
*No, I do not in any way work for or represent GoCanvas.
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.