iFormBuilder for GIS & Engineers

In this book, you will find how iFormBuilder transforms workflows to collect robust data (with or without an internet connection) and successfully deploy large scale mobile data collection projects.

Congratulations GIS

Professionals and

Engineers! With

downloading this ebook,

you are one step closer

to discovering all there

is to know about

iFormBuilder before

implementing your next

field data collection

project.

iFormBuilder for GIS & Engineers 2

Hello Engineers and GIS Professionals: Thank you for taking the time to explore how iFormBuilder is redefining how Engineers and GIS Professionals implement, collect and use data captured in the field. Over the past 5 years, the iFormBuilder team has worked with companies, organizations and universities around the world. Currently, on any given month, data is being collected with iFormBuilder in over 110 countries with millions of transactions being recorded. We truly believe that “Knowledge is Gathered and Good Data changes your world!”!!iFormBuilder goes beyond simply replacing the paper and pencil processes and companies are seeing amazing results. Recently, we have experienced incredible growth in the GIS and Engineering communities. This is largely related to the void that iFormBuilder fills as a mobile data collection solution.!!Additionally, Zerion Software was recently named the 2014 Best New Partner by Esri. iFormBuilder compliments the Esri platform by providing a way for advanced forms to be built. It is an extension to the new Esri offline capabilities. The partnership offers a seamless integration between the two platforms.

In this ebook, you will discover why iFormBuilder has a large following of engineering and GIS Professionals. Individuals who value robust form building features, business logic that brings to life any workflow with calculations, industry grade hardware integrations, flexible API’s for bidirectional data integration and platform integrations like Esri. All of these features and enhancements have transformed the way they do business. !!Our team has extensive experience transforming how field teams work and redefine how success is measured. We love to work with Smart Enterprises that understand the value of mobile solutions to their business. I am personally excited to introduce you to our platform. Discover how the Smart Enterprise leverages iFormBuilder for mobile data collection! Before your next project gets deployed, read this ebook!!!Thank you, !!Ryan Coleman!Director of Customer Success !iFormBuilder!

iFormBuilder for GIS & Engineers 3

The World Isn’t Flat…Why are all your forms?Subforms, Related Tables, !One-To-Many, Object Trees… !Oh my! 

Have you ever wanted to capture one-to-many relationships but never had an easy way? With!iFormBuilder, you can do this through the use of our Subforms. Subforms allow data collectors to capture one-to many records (related tables) very easily. !!For example, let’s say you are inspecting a piece of equipment and there is a safety guard missing from the asset. Traditionally a form will only have one field for a photo, allowing for only one photo to be taken for documentation. For ideal data collection, you may not want to limit the user on how many photos they will take. With the iFormBuilder Subforms, you give the user the ability to take as many photos about a single asset as needed. Each photo’s data is related to that single piece of equipment. !!At the core of iFormBuilder is the fundamental concept that the world isn’t flat and your forms shouldn’t be either. Creating complex workflows is easy where you can share information between form levels, validate information being collected and streamline the whole data collection process. .  !

iFormBuilder for GIS & Engineers 4

iFormBuilder works with some of the worlds largest engineering firms on a wide variety of projects. Projects ranging from city manhole inspections, bridge inspections, asset management, environmental impact studies and much more. !!We have seen that our customers have the need to deploy multiple projects, with different field data collection teams in many different environments. Specifically one project manager, Tom Abraham is famous around the halls for saying, “Within a week…” We refer to it as famous last words!!!With the iFormBuilder platform, projects are able to go from traditional paper or Microsoft Excel spreadsheets in a matter of hours and days not months and quarters of development and traditional SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) timelines. Every project is able to have forms built that are field tested and ready to be in production under a week. Project Managers can have multiple teams starting new projects in a matter of a week whenever they want! !!There are unique features, workflows and integrations that truly set iFormBuilder apart from other mobile data collection platforms. It is important to understand these features before you send another data collection team out to the field.!

“Within a week…”

5iFormBuilder for GIS & Engineers

Flexible & Advanced Form Building Capabilities

“He’s beEn like this ever since we signed up

with iFormBuilder.”

iFormBuilder for GIS & EngineersiFormBuilder for GIS & Engineers 6

Do you want to augment your traditional text based form into a smart, intuitive form that saves time, improves data quality and meets your data collection requirements? !!iFormBuilder boasts 40+ different type of form building elements like signature capture, photo elements, text elements, pick list, hardware integration and much more. !!Beyond the standard form building elements, iFormBuilder has an industry leading logic engine that provides form builders the ability to leverage element level and page level JavaScript to create dynamic and conditional statements or perform calculations directly on the form. !!Leverage the use of a Smart Table Search to pre-populate a form with data based on a unique id. Create a Smart Option List that permits you to take large data sets and break them up into more manageable sections. The options are endless and the form builder is built for enterprise grade data collection! !!

iFormBuilder also has a Dispatching feature. This allows Admins to assign records to users out in the field with pre-populated information already on the form. !!For example. your engineers have to preform inspections on 5 different job sites a day. From the office, each of your 8 field engineers are assigned at the beginning of each day the specific job sites with all the project information already populated directly on the form. All the engineer needs to do is to open the form and preform the inspection. This simple example provides field teams very easy ways to schedule work and build robust functionality into the form. !!For advanced Smart Enterprises, iFormBuilder has a mature and robust API. The API provides the ability for bidirectional data to be pulled from an existing system and populate iFormBuilder and even assign the forms to specific users. Power users are able to automate every part of their workflow even the form building process via the API. !!

Going Beyond Forms

Most companies view paper data collection as an activity that gets filed away “just incase” it needs to be used in the future. The checklist, the work orders, the inspection sheets all get submitted and then put in the old filing cabinet. With iFormBuilder, you can bring your workflow to life! !!Once a record is submitted and synced to the cloud by a user on their device,  it is immediately accessible in iFormBuilder! The platform offers Data Views, Data Feeds, POST and Scoring. The different types are listed below.!!

Views: List, Map, Graph, HTML, Excel or Excel Flat. !Feed: Excel, Excel Flat, JSON, RSS and ATOM.!POST: XML or JSON. By assigning a POST URL to a form, submitted data can be posted directly to a dashboard or an existing backend system or reporting engine.!Scoring: Customize option lists weighted value to implement scoring into reports!

iFormBuilder for GIS & Engineers 7

The devil is in the metadata!

Every time a record is collected with iFormBuilder, the platform captures the user information, time and date stamp and location information including latitude, longitude, altitude, speed and compass direction via the Metadata. This information improves data quality by not leaving it up to the user to collect this data, but instead capturing data in the background of the device.

iFormBuilder for GIS & Engineers 8

Ultra Disconnected Data CollectionWe live in a connected world… but what happens when an internet connection is no where to be found or frankly just not available? !!From day one, iFormBuilder’s development team assumed offline. Once a form is built and makes its way on to a device, an internet connection is not required to collect data. Records are captured and stored locally on the device safely and securely until an internet connection is found. Customers are able to capture information in basements of buildings, in the desert or in the middle of the Congo. 

“Could you

direct me to an

internet cafe

somewhere

nearby?”

iFormBuilder for GIS & Engineers 9

Have you met the ThunderPlug?

 The ThunderPlug gives field teams the ability to collect, collaborate and consume data captured on mobile devices without internet or power! The ThunderPlug® leverages the iFormBuilder platform to truly provide offline data collection without the use of the cloud.!!The ThunderPlug® creates !a local area network for up !to 20 devices within range to !sync data directly to the plug. As an extension of the iFormBuilder platform, Company Admins are able to perform the same tasks and activities while off-line and in the field.  No need to wait to weeks before checking data accuracy!

iFormBuilder for GIS & Engineers 10

Hardware & Software Integration for GIS Professionals. !

Industry Grade

Solutions Require Industry Grade

Hardware  

iFormBuilder has integrated with industry grade hardware to extend the data collection abilities for field teams. Scan barcodes using the integrated Manatee Works® widget or use external devices by Infinite Peripheral or Socket. !!Improve GPS accuracy with bluetooth devices like Dual, Badelf or SXBlue II devices. Capture temperature with the ETI BlueTherm™ temperature probe or print iFormBuilder records directly to a Zebra® printer. All seamlessly integrated into the platform.

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The iFormBuilder Dedicated Database provides Smart Enterprises with the infrastructure to manage multiple projects and scale their data collection to a whole new level. !!Each group, project, department or team can have its own profile within the dedicated database. This means all forms, data and users from one profile are separated from the forms data and users of other profiles in the dedicated database. No need to worry about who has access to the data! Users each having their own identity and permissions to collect or view data can only access forms within their profile.  !!Some of our larger customers are managing hundreds of projects across 80 countries with the dedicated database.  

iFormBuilder Dedicated Database

iFormBuilder for GIS & Engineers 12

iFormBuilder + Esri: Better Together

iFormBuilder for GIS & Engineers 13

For the past five years, we have worked with many engineering firms and GIS professional. Through that experience, we learned that many were spending too much time post processing their data to prepare it to be uploaded to the ArcGIS platform. Thankfully, a customer finally asked if there was an easier or better way. Our world has never been the same. !!With iFormBuilder’s ability to capture offline data, build complex forms, capture one-to-many relationships via subforms and enable a field data collation team the iFormBuilder Esri Connector was born. This gives the ability to capture additional data beyond what traditionally would be entered in ArcGIS. !!The iFormBuilder Esri Connector allows for GIS professionals to import an existing feature service from ArcGIS and create a form in iFormBuilder that data can be collected on. Once data is collected in iFormBuilder, data is populated in ArcGIS. Furthermore, GIS professionals can build a form in iFormBuilder and publish form as a feature service in ArcGIS. !!This bi-directional data and form sharing service leverages the iFormBuild end Esri API’s to publish data to both platforms. !!

The Esri Connector

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The iFormBuilder tools for ArcGIS server allow GIS Professionals to take existing iFormBuilder Form Structure — including related tables — and import this into a File Geodatabase in ArcGIS for Desktop with synchronization options to pull in the most up to date data. !!Once data resides in the File Geodatabase in ArcGIS, sharing data with in-house teams is easier then ever, with data publishing options to your ArcGIS Server. !!This suite of tools is accessible on !GitHub and available for iFormBuilder !and Esri Customers to build additional !geo-processing tools.

iFormBuilder + ArcGIS Server

iFormBuilder for GIS & Engineers 14

Collector for ArcGIS

+ iFormBuilder: Together At

Last!

Get the best of both worlds. Leverage all the advanced GIS features of the Collector for ArcGIS app and the advanced form building features of iFormBuilder at the same time. !!With the iFormBuilder + Collector app integration, users are able to select features on Collector and call a form in iForm. Data can be shared between both apps taking your field data collect to the next level.

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A B O U T I F O R M B U I L D E R

iFormBuilder is a universal, cloud based

mobile data collection platform helping

customers around the globe collect data

on their mobile devices. Here at

iFormBuilder, we believe “Knowledge is

Gathered.” The iFormBuilder Mobile

Platform offers companies, universities,

non-governmental organizations and

government agencies the ability to build

robust and flexible forms, maintain

unmatched security on mobile devices and

collect data with or without an Internet

connection.

Zerion Software Inc. I iFormBuilder.com

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