Latest Contributions by JeffShaner

Thank you Paul. I really look forward to your feedback and use cases. Please feel free to reach out directly to our [email protected] alias as well. I would love to understand where you see breadcrumbs inside of Collector in comparison to say GPS streaming of lines and potentially in the context of nested or partial feature collection as well. These are all on our roadmap for Collector and we want to make sure we have the workflows referenced properly. Right now our focus with Collector is to get Android done and out the door!! ... View more

All, This is a great discussion and thank you very much for all of the thoughtful comments you have added into this thread. I'd like to provide context on where we are and what we have built to date. Please though, if you ever have questions about why we are building what we are building don't hesitate to ask us. Thanks for @mentioning Craig and I John. Our mission is to build effective, intuitive apps that meet your needs and we can't do that without your feedback.  Ok with that said, why did we build Tracker? Well, there were several reasons. The primary reason was to support organizations that need to know where their staff are and record where they have been (to enhance situational awareness and ultimately for accountability reasons). That extends well beyond the field worker and that is why it is licensed with a Viewer user type and higher. In fact, the target user for our initial launch was not someone using a field data collection app like Collector or Survey123. We are seeing customers that want to track anywhere from 500 to 2000 to 150,000 users and more! We also needed to build a tracking solution that worked offline, worked in the background, and was easy on battery life so that it could support a full 10 - 12 hour day without a charge. As part of this effort, we quickly realized that a traditional hosted feature service was not the right solution. It would struggle to manage the throughput of tracks and would consume too many credits. Tracks will have a much higher storage volume than other GIS features. We are building the proper infrastructure within ArcGIS Online now and felt it was too soon to release. It was a very difficult decision to make but one that we thought was best to do. With ArcGIS Enterprise we already had a robust data store for this that we could use. This new location tracking capability is setting a foundation for not only the Tracker app to write to but for others as well. It is the first phase in a series of releases. In fact, the Indoors app is already writing to the same service and other apps can as well. At the same time, Collector is going through an evolution. We are phasing in capabilities/platforms as we go. This is a huge effort and it is taking time to complete. The first phase of location tracking work will be to add support where Tracker is installed. Collector will be able to draw tracks directly within the app, it will honor the settings in the Tracker app and will be able to remotely control the Tracker app. Here we are targeting workflows where it is important to know where a field worker is located at all times and where they have been. Where they use the Collector app to capture data (collect and inspect) but they need to have their location shared even when the app is not running (worker safety being perhaps the primary need but also for accountability purposes as well).  This is our current development plan and where we have seen the needs around location tracking (both with field workers and without). If there are other workflows where you see a gap, PLEASE let us know. We want to make sure that we address your needs. Thanks! Jeff ... View more

Hi Stef - snapping is on our short term roadmap. We are hoping to start a beta program for iOS in early 2019 again as well. ... View more