Latest Contributions by PatrickHuls_SpatialNinja

Hello TGI5 and welcome back to another episode. I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving for those of you watching in the US and for those of you around the world, I hope you had a great week last week. For this week's episode, I wanted to highlight some newer capabilities in ArcGIS around creating an application to collect photo inspections and viewing those in an oriented imagery viewer. So let's jump in and take a look at what this all looks like when it comes together. And then I'll break down how to set up your own Photo Inspections and oriented imagery viewing applications. Ok, so here we have an Experience Builder application in which we have brought in some reality capture mesh data for the Orlando area. On our map, we have some physical network infrastructure, as well as these photo points. These photo points were taken with the Quick Capture photo inspection template. Now, once we bring in those points into our Experience Builder app, by leveraging the oriented imagery capabilities, we're able to see not only the picture that was taken but the viewshed of that picture. We'll notice in our Oriented Imagery viewer we can pan around the photo that was taken from our photo inspection Quick Capture application and we're able to see that viewshed from the photo. As we Zoom in and pan around, we'll see that viewshed change within our photo as well. Now, the photo inspection template within Quick Capture can be used to collect walk out survey information. It can be used to locate infrastructure like this manhole or just capture photos while out in the field. That may help some engineering down the line. Now as we take a look at this last photo, here, this third example. Again, once we pan around our photo in the Oriented Imagery Widget, we can see the viewshed for that photo change within our 3D Web scene. So how do we put together an application and workflow like this? Well, first we start in ArcGIS Quick Capture and we can use the photo inspection template. So if you go to the Esri templates, you'll notice that there is a photo inspection template that you can use to help create your photo inspection Quick Capture app. Now, I've already gone ahead and done that. And here is what that template looks like. We can collect information like the surveyor or field engineer, and each button collects the severity of our photo inspection as well as the actual photo. Now to set up the oriented imagery capture capabilities, we go to the map tab, then the three buttons and we have this view oriented imagery. Now, when you set this up for the first time, it will say collect oriented imagery, and this will add all the necessary fields into the data capturing workflow. Once you've done that, that photo inspection feature layer can then be brought in to any of the web maps and apps in ArcGIS as well as Experience Builder where there is an oriented imagery widget. Now, this widget that we can see here allows us to select that photo inspection layer from a group in our portal organization or in the map in our application. Just like that, we can bring in this oriented imagery widget into our end application. Now, there's lots of documentation on this workflow, including some great blogs that are available, and I'll be sure to provide a link to this particular blog that also walks through how to set up your own photo inspection template and quick Capture as well as this oriented imagery widget in Experience Builder. So this has been another episode of TGI5. I hope you enjoyed learning a little bit more about the photo inspection template in Quick Capture and the ability to set up oriented imagery viewing within our ArcGIS Experience Builder. Until next time we're out. Oriented imagery meets field data collection Blog: https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/quickcapture/field-mobility/oriented-imagery-meets-field-data-collection/ -Patrick Huls ... View more

Hey, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Telecom GIS in five minutes. For this week's episode, I wanted to take some time to show you all some ways that you can customize your ArcGIS online or ArcGIS Enterprise Portal Homepage and show you some ways that you can create an Experience Builder app that can be leveraged as that main interface into your portal, that can provide a little bit more of a tailored experience for your end users. So let's jump right into it. Now, when you first stand up ArcGIS Enterprise or login to your ArcGIS online organization, you probably will see a very similar default homepage with a main banner stretched across the screen. Now we can see that I've added some common maps and apps that are links right here on the homepage. Now how I was able to add these Map app links is by going in and editing our home page, which brings up this nice builder interface. Now, this builder interface allows us to customize the header, these content blocks where we have the base maps or our commonly used maps and apps, as well as the default color scheme here within our Home page. Now this Homepage Builder, while nice, can still be a little limiting in what content we can present to our end users. The homepage of our portal also has these links here at the top, which for many users in your organization, may be too much for them. So we want to create more of a tailored experience that just presents them the maps and apps that they need with additional information to help them do their job or get a hold of us the GIS team to be able to put together the maps and apps that they are looking for. So I want to show an example here of an Experience Builder app that we have put together that can be used in lieu of that portal homepage. So this Experience Builder application is now our destination for end users. When they come to this URL and they log in, we can see that their user identity is shown and they are logged into this application. And now we've got some additional branding and links and access to maps and apps directly within this Experience Builder app. So unlike the Portal Homepage, we can take some of the common maps and apps and directly embed them within this home page. We've got a viewer application here an example of taking a dashboard app and also embedding it into Experience Builder. And then as we scroll down on this application webpage, we can now see some other reporting applications and dashboards that summarize information about our networks, market analysis, and other GIS data that resides within our portal. So instead of providing the links to maps and apps on the Home page, we now have these applications easily accessible through this alternate homepage. Now, along with providing these featured apps or our common maps and apps directly embedded here. Using Experience Builder, we can create these different pages. So in this example, we've created a page for additional apps which pulls in the groups within this portal. So if I'm logged in as someone from customer care, I will only see the customer care group here. And from this group, I can now dive into any additional maps and apps that are shared with me. So once again, instead of being limited to the number of maps or apps in the homepage, we can now expand the number of maps and apps and give our end users a more tailored experience. Now within this Experience Builder app, we've also added an option here to give our end users the ability to make a map. So similarly to the home page and the Webmap tab, which takes you into the Webmap, we've taken the Webmap viewer and embedded it directly in Experience Builder. So if I'm an end user and I wanted to start to explore data that is being maintained and shared into this portal, we can jump in here and we can start to add those layers that reside within our portal and do some self service mapping, adding our own authoritative layers to the map, doing some analysis, creating our Web maps and be a little bit more self sufficient. But we are still limiting the amount of bells and whistles that our end users have within this tailored portal experience. Now, another common challenge that we see within the organizations that we work with is being able to share GIS information with other teams and by GIS information. I mean, how to get a hold of the GIS team, what ArcGIS licenses are available for other teams to use, and if those other teams have any technical issues, who should they contact? So another nice thing about this tailored home page here using Experience Builder is that we can provide additional information in this webpage. So here we have a tab for ArcGIS Deployment and Use which walks through some additional information. If a user is interested in leveraging ArcGIS Pro or maybe setting up their own ArcGIS enterprise licenses, what do they need to do and how do they get a hold of either the GIS team or those licenses? Another tab here for training and support, so you can offer and provide additional information on how end users and different teams can access training that's available or provide the 1-800 number and the Esri .Com website for logging technical support cases and resolving any tech support issues that end users may have, as well as providing just more information on my Esri, how end users could sign up for my Esri, how they can download their own licenses, request access to licenses. So this is all great information that I am sure you all in the GIS side have received similar questions from different teams across your organization asking for these details. So by leveraging this Experience Builder framework, you can now share and expose a lot of this information to the end users that you serve in your organization. Now, the last thing that I want to show here is just the Experience Builder set up. So here we can see that I've created kind of this template, and within this template, we've embedded our applications and we've embedded our buttons and hyperlinks, and we've set links to different pages. So Experience Builder allows you to create these very interactive and dynamic web pages, along with building your traditional GIS Web apps. So I encourage you all to take a look at Experience Builder. And if the Portal home page isn't quite enough for your end users and you want to create a bit more of a tailored experience, this is a great application to take a look at to help address some of those challenges. So thank you all for watching this week's episode. If you have any questions on how I put this together, or you would like us to share a template of this for your use in your organization, feel free to comment on this post or reach out to us, and we can send you this template for Experience Builder. So until next time we're out. -Patrick Huls ... View more

Hey, everybody and welcome to another episode of Telecom GIS in five minutes. This week the Esri Telecom team is at the Connect (x) conference here in Orlando, Florida. This event is all about the wireless industry and 5G innovations and the telecom infrastructure required to support these innovations. So we thought it would be relevant to showcase a demonstration of the RF wireless solutions and fiber planning that the Esri Telecom team is showcasing here at the event. So without further ado, let's jump into a demonstration. As communication networks have evolved, so has GIS and its role in planning nextgen networks. Network planners and engineers need geospatial tools to assist in not only automated fiber design, but wireless RF planning as well. Because broadband can be delivered via fiber, HFC, WiFi, fixed wireless, and numerous other ways, a one trick GIS or engineering tool, limits a planning teams ability to be as efficient and effective as possible. ArcGIS as a comprehensive geospatial system allows network planners to access all the tools necessary to plan communication networks no matter the network technology, and that's what I'd like to show in this demonstration. So let's continue our planning around addressing the digital divide in Lakeland, Florida. The schools we've targeted as public WiFi locations will also serve as locations for fixed wireless deployment. So let's understand what the wireless coverage will be and perform some RF engineering. Then let's move into fiber planning to connect all these sites together. So once again, we can see our schools here on the map and using our connected GIS, we can add our suitability results, which have been filtered down to the final set of school targets. These are those seven locations that we will use to generate our RF coverage. Using the Expera Online solution that is built on ArcGIS, we can easily take a spreadsheet that contains the information about the type of wireless equipment and spectrum that we want to use and drop it into our RF calculation tool. The setup of this tool lets us verify each location before running the analysis. Once we have verified all of the antenna information from our spreadsheets and each of the sites locations, we can then run our analysis. Here we have our RSSI coverage results for each of the sites that we plan to deploy fixed wireless at, but not only do we have this coverage map, which we can overlay on top of our imagery, but for each building and home. We can also see the expected signal strength. Selecting on a home location shows us the rooftop signal strength, a tested signal strength adjust 5ft above the ground, and the best possible signal strength if a receiver was placed on a mass outside of the home. So as we are calculating homes path for a new fixed wireless offering, we'll be able to better understand which homes are serviceable and their quality of experience. Now, whether we are providing broadband access via fixed wireless, WiFi, or fixed line, a fiber back bone is still needed, so let's transition from RF planning to fiber planning and see what it's going to take to provide fiber to each of these sites. Once again, we have our proposed sites and the original suitability results added to the map. And just as we've added this data from our connected GIS, we can also add the RF engineering output as well as our As-built fiber network. This fiber network and the network access points, the Splices, the FDHs, PEDs, etc. Will be used in our high-level fiber design, so our goal now is to optimize the proposed new fiber routes that will connect all of these schools or fixed wireless sites to our existing fiber network. Using ArcGIS and the Network Path Planner Spatial Analysis Tool planning routes no longer requires hand drawn lines in Google Earth. The Path Planner tool leverages a street network to optimize the proposed fiber routes. All we need to do is put in our network access point and the sites that we want to connect. Then give a name for our project and run the tool. The tool uses spatial analysis and the street network to locate the shortest distance path back to the existing network. The tool will also daisy chain sites together. If it made sense for a site to feed into another site. And now that we have these network paths, we can then see the footage of each route and generate a high level cost for this fiber project. ArcGIS as a comprehensive geospatial system, provides the tools for next gen network planning and engineering. ArcGIS provides that one connected GIS system to easily go from planning wireless networks to fix line networks so that engineers can address the digital divide as optimally as possible. So this has been another episode of TGI5. Thanks for watching. We hope to see you all at future industry events and until next time we're out. -Patrick Huls ... View more

Welcome back everybody to another episode of TGI5. In this week's episode, we're going to demonstrate how you can leverage Esri's demographic data with ArcGIS business analyst to help project scope and analyze underserved communities and help to address the digital divide. So without further ado, let's jump right into our demonstration. Understanding the digital divide and broadband availability is a geographic analysis problem. Where are the underserved communities and why? How do we better serve them as efficiently and effectively as possible? Those are the questions we'll look to answer in this demonstration as we start scoping out our broadband expansion projects. Now, all good analysis starts with good data. Esri offers a curated library of geographic data through the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World that can be used during the project scope and analysis phase of a network buildout and specifically to help understand where underserved communities exist, how many people are underserved and who these residents are. There are demographic data sets, broadband access and availability data sets, and data sets of the FCC Form 477 submission results. So using this geographic data with geographic analysis, let's see if we can understand the digital divide of the community of Lakeland Florida and then locate ideal community centers and schools to use as free public WiFi locations, or fixed wireless sites to offer a better broadband connection to the community's residence with ArcGIS, you can map any geographic data that you have as well as leverage the geographic data that as we curates. Here is the form 477 seven data set added to our map. The areas in Pink have a lower broadband score, which means based on the form 477 submission results. These are the areas with poor broadband speeds and few other options for Internet. So for this demo, these will be the areas we want to better serve. I'll also add to the map community centers, points of interest and schools that we may want to offer WiFi at, or even for a fixed wireless site deployment. Now that we have the data in our map, let's perform a 20 minutes walk time analysis for these sites, which will allow us to understand the neighborhood that will benefit from a WiFi hotspot. Will focus just on schools for today. So I'll Select the schools in the Lakeland Florida area and we'll create our 20 minutes walk time buffers. We can visually see the walk times and the neighborhoods within a 20 minutes walking distance. But let's actually use suitability analysis to prioritize these sites based on how underserved these neighborhoods are and how many residents we would actually be serving. Suitability analysis allows us to weight different variables to understand how suitable a location is for meeting a certain criteria, like addressing an underserved community. There are many different socioeconomic and demographic variables to choose from, but I've created a specific list for broadband accessibility. The variables that I've selected include the median, upload and download speeds, number of Internet service providers, total housing units, household income, and population growth. I've weighted upload and download speeds the highest, which means these variables will have the greatest influence on our suitability rankings. Now as we run this analysis, and then view the results. We have a final score for each school or target public WiFi location for how suitable that site is based on those weighted variables, we can always go back and change our variables or their weights if we decide to focus more on population growth and housing units, for example. Now that we have the rankings of sites in our suitability results, there is more than likely a project manager or team or city official who needs to make a final decision on which of these broadband projects to go ahead. With with ArcGIS, you can easily share analysis results through PDFs, Web Maps and dashboards. Just like this dashboard we see here, this dashboard allows me to select a prospective site and view its location on the map with other nearby telecom infrastructure. And also view an interactive infographic. We can explore the suitability analysis variables for each site, along with additional broadband accessibility variables to help us make a final decision on which sites to offer WiFi at. Whether it's specifically addressing digital divide, looking for areas to expand broadband into, prioritizing public WiFi locations, or locating sites for fixed wireless. The geographic data and geographic analysis tools offered by ArcGIS can assist in all of your broadband buildout project scoping and analysis. Thanks everybody for watching another episode of TGI5 and be on the lookout for future episodes in which we will cover additional ways that ArcGIS can help address the digital divide. So until next time we're out. - Patrick Huls ... View more

Hello once again and welcome to this week's episode of TGI5. In the episode today, we are going to take a look at a workflow around Churn prediction leveraging some tools within ArcGIS and spatial analysis to help us understand what customers may be likely to churn. So without further ado, let's jump into the demo. We're going to take a look at a newer tool in ArcGIS for assisting with Churn prediction. Now, ArcGIS offers hundreds of spatial and statistical tools, including a lot of those newer machine learning and prediction tool set. One of these tools is the Forest based classification and regression tool. So here's our scenario. I have a Customer 360 database with just over a million data points that were provided to us by every partner share tracker with some additional variables that we've generated internally, and we can see all those locations shown here in blue. Now this heat map on top shows us those customers that have cancel their service and turned within the last year. And what I want to better understand is why. And if we can understand why they left, then we can start to locate other current customers who have similar Churn characteristics and put together some marketing campaigns to influence their decision to stay well before they churn. So using this Customer 360 database, as well as the Forest based classification and regression tool, we ran this machine learning tool against a variety of different variables to see how they impact or influence the turning of customers. So some of those variables that we tested against were things like years as a customer, their total bill, or how much they spend on telecom services. Are there any competitive threats in the area? Do they have bundled services? How many devices at home do they have connected at once? What are the total number of reported technical issues? And we also took this data and we geoenriched it with some Esri demographic data. So we could also add additional demographic variables like the tapestry segmentation. And if we wanted to add an additional geographic variable like distance to central office, we could have also added that as well. Now, the results of the analysis produce a trained data set that lets us know all the different variables that influence Churn and how much they influenced Churn. So it produces a level of accuracy or a level of confidence that these variables actually did influence a customer to leave our organization. Now let's take a look at these results within a chart. So the top factors or variables that influence Churn were the total bill of a customer or how much they were spending the dominant Tapestry segmentation and how many times they reported technical issues. Now, if we like the level of confidence that the analysis had in these variables, we can then take this train data set and run it against our current customers in our Customer 360 database. This would then produce a result with a predicted probability that a customer is about to churn. Now, based on these analysis results, let's say we've implemented some campaigns to target those customers with a high probability of churning, and we want to monitor the impact of those campaigns. So what we've done is we have put together a dashboard to allow executive teams start to see how these campaigns are influencing Churn and look at our churn numbers month by month or year over year, so we can see for our entire service footprint how many customers have left this year versus last year, and then get a breakdown of how many of those customers disconnected their broadband or TV service. I can also drill down into a particular area and start to see the churn numbers for a region or a territory. Thank you all for watching the TGI5 episode this week. I hope this was insightful and you saw some ways to use the forest-based classification and spatial analysis tools within ArcGIS to help your organization understand churn and predict likelihood that a customer will cut their service. And until next time we're out. -Patrick Huls ... View more

  Hey, everybody. And welcome back to another episode of TGI5. As Hurricanes and wildfires and other natural disasters continue to wreck havoc on our infrastructure, including our telecommunications network, I thought it would be a good idea to review the outage damage assessment solution that Esri has to offer. So this solution encompasses a variety of applications, allowing organizations to quickly respond and collect information on damaged assets while out in the field, there's a damage assessment center which allows you to assign work orders for damage assessments out in the field. View those work orders and damage is reported from the field in a manager application, and then see holistically all of the work orders and those damaged assets in a dashboard. The solution also leverages two mobile applications, the Workforce Mobile app and Field Maps, to respond to damage assessment work orders, as well as collect those damages in the field. So now let's jump into the damage assessment center and start to showcase this solution. So we'll notice at the top there are a few tabs here that provide us with access to different applications as part of this overall solution. The first tab is the Create tab, which opens up Workforce for our GIS directly in the application. Here we can see the previous damage assessment work orders that have been assigned to our teams, and in our map, we have access to all of our asset information with the ability to search for a particular asset. So in this example, we're searching for our asset number 925, which is a slice enclosure that we want to create a work order for someone to go out and take a look at. So creating an assignment allows us to select this as a damage assessment work order and assignment to one of our field technicians, Tyler West, and then populate some additional information on this work order. Now, as soon as we create this assignment, it'll be available for our technician to see in the field. Now, before we jump into the field, I want to open up the Manage tab, which allows us to see all of the work orders and damages that have been reported in the field. So here is our newly created work order for inspecting this access cable component, and the pop up shows us some additional information on the work order and its status. But now let's jump into our mobile application. So here on my tablet, I want to use a couple of apps to help respond to the damages in the field. The first one is Workforce for ArcGIS. So opening this app up, we can see that we have a new damage assessment work order that has come in. So as a field technician, I can select on that work order, I can see where it is. I can even navigate to that work order using Navigator. And then we can start this work order assignment, which lets the folks back in the office know that I'm out in the field working to collect damage assessments. Now, in order to collect the actual damage assessments, we want to use field maps. So let's launch into field maps where we are taken directly to the work order location, and we can see our asset maps and our physical network inventory. Here is that splice enclosure, that asset 925 in which we are having some issues with. And while out in the field, we notice that there is a fiber cut and down fiber strand. So here's a listing of all the different types of damages that you can collect while out in the field. So what we want to do is just collect our fiber cut location here on the map, we can enter in an asset ID if it makes sense for that fiber cable or the piece of equipment and any general notes, maybe how to respond to this damage, like new span or new fiber strand is needed. We could also attach a photo of this damage, and then we can submit that to the back office. But once my damage assessment is completed, we can jump back into workforce, and we can then finish our work order. So here we are back in the damage assessment center under the Manage tab, where we can see that our work order has changed from assigned to complete it, and we can see the damage assessment that has come in from the field. Once we've resolved the issue, like replacing some span or this fiber cable, we can then update the status of the damage assessment. So it's going to go from collected to the work has been completed, and we can change the date that we completed it any photos that have been collected, we can also download all of those photos if we need to add those to a PDF report or to send to somebody else in the organization. And finally, there's the monitor tab, which provides us a dashboard view of all this information. So here we have the access cable component work order that we originally assigned to our field technician, and we can see that it has been completed. And we have a tab here for all the damaged assets or the damage assessments. Once again, here's that fiber cut damage assessment that we collected, which is now showing a status of completed. So this has been a quick overview of the outage damage assessment solution. Again, this solution can be quickly deployed into your ArcGIS online organization, and all of these applications can be stood up very quickly. If your organization needs to start assessing some damage to your infrastructure out in the field, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out, and I hope everyone is staying safe. Thank you. Until next time, were out. -Patrick Huls ... View more

Welcome back to Telecom GIS in 5 Min. This week we discuss the ArcGIS identity-based security model. We talk about ArcGIS User Types, Member Roles, and Item Sharing.  These are the three tiers of security built into ArcGIS. Check out the links below for more info. trust.arcgis.com - https://trust.arcgis.com/en/ Content management best practices - https://www.esri.com/content/dam/esrisites/en-us/media/whitepaper/content-management-techniques-for-your-arcgis-enterprise-portal.pdf Until next time, we're out. -Patrick Huls ... View more

Hey, everybody. And welcome back to TGI5. This week's episode, I wanted to walk through a new solution that we've been working on called the Walkout Survey Solution. This solution sets up maps and apps for your organization to be able to assign, track, and perform a Walkout survey. So let's jump in and show some of the applications that are parts of this Walkout survey solution. We'll first start with the Walkout Survey Center. This application is the main hub for your Walkout surveys. From within this main app, you can access the different tabs for the different parts of the Walkout survey workflow. The first tab here is the Manage tab, and this is really where we start to set up and manage all of our Walkout survey projects. So the first thing I want to do when setting up a new project is search for a location in which we want to perform our Walkout survey. So we have a new customer, this Oviedo mall that is requesting us to build out fiber services to them. So we're going to give this project a name and then start to digitize in just a general project boundary for this particular project. You'll notice that the status is automatically populated as 'proposed'. So we'll save this project. And now I want to sketch in a proposed route for this project and our fiber build out. And lastly, we'll put in a termination point for our fiber drop. So now that we have our project set up, I want to create a set of maps and layers that are specific to this project and share that with our field staff. So we'll open up our project creator. Now, this is using an ArcGIS notebook that will create views of our Walkout survey. It'll create specific layers for our field crews to go out and perform their walkout, as well as create a specific web map for them to use. Now, this notebook runs through a set of Python code, presents to me all of the projects that are in the proposed stage, and then allows me to create these project items. Now, if you've got multiple teams or multiple contractors working on different projects, this allows you to segment out your projects for those specific teams while still keeping one master set of maps and layers that house all of your projects and all of the assets and information collected during the Walkout survey. Now, as this process finishes up, we can then see the view layer as well as the map that were created for this project. And if we open up our project folder, I can then take these two items and share them with our field operations, Construction and provisioning team. So now that we've set up our project, let's jump back into the Walkout Survey Center, go to the assigned tab, and create a work order for one of our field teams to go out and perform this Walkout survey. We'll notice that the assigned tab launches into Workforce for RCIs directly embedded into the Walkout survey center. We'll search for our project, which takes us right to the location. Selecting on the project then allows me to create a new field survey assignments. We can assign it to our working field engineer, Tyler West, modify some of the priority information, and then create this assignment. So now that we've created this work force assignment, let's jump into our Workforce mobile application and start performing our walkout survey. So the next steps in the workflow are to perform our field work. Here on my tablet, I have access to the Workforce mobile application, which provides me with access to all of my work orders. Here is our field survey that needs to be performed, and from here we can start this assignment. This lets those in the back office know that we have started our work. Now let's jump into field maps where we can search for the field map that has been created for our walk out survey. This opens up our field map map where I've got access to the project information and our proposed route. And from here, we can start to collect assets during our walk out. So if we want to Mark off where there is a pedestal, we'll drop that point on the map. We can add attachments if we want, and then we can submit that record. Now, we want to take this asset, this particular feature, and we want to add it to our project. This then creates a relationship and an Association between this particular asset and that project. So the next time we have projects in this area, we can see all of the previous assets that were collected during the walkout. So instead of recapturing poll locations, cabinets, and pedestal locations, we can just reuse any of these features that we have collected on any one of our walkouts. Now, I'll go ahead and just collect one more asset, and this will be a distribution poll. We can also Mark whether or not there are any violations on this particular poll. So if we do see a poll or joint used violation, we can add that note to our poll record and then submit that. And then again, I want to associate this particular record to this project. And once we have performed our walkout survey, we can jump back into work force and we can Mark our work order as completed. Now, let's jump back into the office to show how we can monitor the status of all of these walkout survey projects. Now, back in the Walkout survey center under the Manage tab, here is our existing project footprint, and now we can see some of the features that have been collected during our walk out survey. If we want to update the status of this overall project, we can select our project and then change the status of not only the project, but also all of the assets that were collected during the actual walkout. And finally, within the Walkout survey center, there is a monitor tab that has a dashboard embedded for tracking the status of all of our Walkout surveys. We can see the project listed here on the right hand side, and we can select our project, Zoom right to it, and start to see how many poles were collected during that walk out, if any of them have a violation, and the type of poll that was collected and any other general assets that were also collected during the walkout. We also get a summary view of the total footage of fiber that is being used within this proposed project. If we want to track the actual work orders, we can then open up our assignment details and assignment stats tabs and start to see the actual work orders that are taking place for these walkouts as well. And so this has been a quick review of the Walkout survey solution that we've been working on. Please feel free to provide us some feedback and insights. And if you are interested in accessing this solution, just let us know. And until next time, we're out.   - Patrick Huls ... View more

Welcome back to Telecom GIS in five minutes. As we're continuing our push on the NexGen network management, we realized there are all kinds of users out there looking for a solution that could revolutionize their current data management method. And they're not just telecom builders and operators. These conversations were happening with other electric, gas and other utility companies, local and regional government and transportation authorities and many, many other use cases. I want to use today as an opportunity to show you how we can start managing both utilities and communication systems, all on one single pane of glass. In order to do that, I am leveraging the latest and greatest utility network management, in ArcGIS. This provide a comprehensive framework of functionality for modeling utility systems such as electric and telecommunications, all at the same time. And check this out. We have electric system on the bottom of the map and some sample telecom system on the top, which both are riding on the same utility network database. And with the utility network, we have built in thousands of business rules to ensure data integrity and secure a functional network topology. It is designed to model all the components within your systems. And let's take a quick look at one of those cross section where we have both electric and telecommunication elements going through the same route. Let's go through a network trace exercise to identify some ducts. We have space availabilities for new cables. I will start by placing the trace starting point at the end point on two of the knockout features. Simply use this selection tool to select those two features and add them as trace locations within the utility network ribbon. And now let's kind of zoom out a little bit so we can see the full picture. Now, within the utility network, trace tools simply select the shortest path tracing and by adding a couple trace parameters to limit the trace to available ducts within the banks. Now, we could get a return of results on all the related structures and all the available ducts that has enough space for new cables. Now, let's zoom back in to one of the cross section and we're going to select one of the top bank. Just from this selection itself, you could clearly see there's electric line and also a communication line going through the same area. And now let's expand that duct bank and look at all the details. You can see the first two ducts within the duct bank occupied by either of the lines. And to do all this ArcGIS utility network management is the foundational technology based on a next generation Enterprise GIS. Is designed to meet the evolving needs of utilities and telecommunication, as well as to serve planning and engineering workflows and also operation and maintenance activities. And as a quick summary, you could easily use our pre-configured editor templates to execute any kind of designs for electric system and communications system all at the same time. We all living in one large connected world with cross domain infrastructure systems, and GIS is the platform that could support all aspects of these next generation digital infrastructure all together. Until the next time we out.   ... View more