Announcing the HTML5 Performance Atlas

A fully renovated Performance Atlas for Right of Way is coming at you!

Our shop is humming with intensity! After some fun and thought-provoking design work, we are now deeply engaged in developing the new and better Performance Atlas that many of you have been anticipating. We’ve been pretty immersed in the process and are probably overdue for sharing some updates.

Here are a few…

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What’s in the oven?

More map

Just about every editorial function will now be available from the map view.

• Update acquisition status
• Complete tasks
• Edit landowner data
• Enter easements
• Add documents
• Add permitting information
• Track expenses
• Enter stipulations, vesting, and title info
• Record comments and agent journal entries
• ....all from the map!

More admin

More control for customizing your Atlas in general and across projects.

• Setup project-specific settings for items such as tasks, acquisition status values, and additional reference map layers
• Take advantage of branding and styling settings to personalize and customize your Atlas.

More tools

• “Fast Filters” to gain instant visual feedback about the status of work and performance on projects.
• Redlining, commenting, and mark up tools
• Expanded “identify” and “hot feature” feedback tools that work against parcel layers and reference map layers alike.
• Print reporting with options for high resolution output.

But, wait, there’s More!

Public and Client View modules

Want to offer a subset of functions to collect public feedback at an unsecured / open web address? Want to offer appropriate tools to your customers without letting them get too deep and fudge the system up? These new add-ins will streamline the process!

Responsive design

The new Atlas will be responsive, meaning it will gracefully conform to different devices end-users have for interacting with the tool.

Anything else?

Yes! As some of you know, we work from a “backlog” of features and functions. As we work in the above features, we will move to other capabilities and features. Please keep telling us what you’d love to see! We built this thing for you, guys!

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And when’s all this coming out of the oven?

No half-baked software please!  We remain committed to releasing solid, thoroughly tested code. To satisfy our own standards of craftsmanship and make sure you get something that’s ready to run with, we anticipate completing the majority of development work in July and reserving August and early September for integration testing and refinements. Currently, we anticipate releasing the HTML5 version of the Atlas in the third week of September.

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What works for you?

You know the drill. We are happy to work in a way that responds to and accommodates your needs and schedules. For many of you, the Atlas is a business critical tool and integrating a major new version must be done with planning and care. Do you have a big project that would benefit from an earlier delivery? Do you need key customizations in place for scheduled work? Do you prefer to delay implementation of the new version for certain reasons?

Let’s talk. We’ll work with you to plan things out in a way that meets your needs.

The Love of Tools: Get Your Business in Line with Atlassian Cloud

For the love of tools

Ask any craft person about their favorite tools and you will almost without exception enjoy an interesting conversation that provides a very personal view of how people think about and do their work. What makes one tool more valuable than the others? Why are the handles of one or two tools more polished with use?

Software tools are maybe a little more of an esoteric topic. But doing what we do, we need them, and we use them every day. Atlassian Cloud is one of our very favorites. It is certainly our most used. At any given time during the workday, there is at least two or three of the Atlassian products in use by different members of our crew.

We really like it – it’s versatile, flexible, and, with some application and discipline, it can add a lot of efficiency to the process of running technical projects and building software. Especially if your team is using Agile methods.

The Atlassian Cloud

Initially, we started by simply using JIRA to create and assign tasks to our developers. We plugged Tempo in so that we could track time. Eventually, we started using Confluence. It started as a way for our solution architect to write up technical descriptions of JIRA tasks for our developers, but we soon moved into making Confluence the central hub of a project. Each project now has a main page, with various macros that show issues, progress and any other key stats and performance indicators we want to track.

Confluence is super easy to use and allows for better team collaboration. Threaded comments make it easy to track discussions related to particular issues or tasks. We love using the Gliffy plugin to create attractive and easy to understand diagrams. We’ve recently begun to create Confluence spaces for clients in order to provide constantly up-to-date documentation and FAQ for the products that we’ve developed for them.  We’ve also integrated issue tracking capabilities directly into our software so our developers and testers share a common means of logging and following the status of issues with our customers; software users can log issues directly from a product UI and they are automagically added to the tracking system together with relevant action and exception details.

Atlassian helps us be better at Agile

Much of our development work is informed by the principles of %28software_development%29” target=”_blank”>product backlog and to assign the constituent items into sprints, epics, versions and so on.  The tools are presented with a pleasingly intuitive logic – lots of drag and drop gestures, highlight/click and there you have the actions you would hope for.

Our development team uses Bitbucket as a code repository. Every code check-in can be tracked to a JIRA issue. Code check-ins cause an auto-build of an application, so that once a developer submits their work, our testers will get a status notification and will know specifically what’s ready for them to start testing. If the code tests fine, our tester can then close that issue in JIRA. If they find a bug, they can quickly re-open that issue and have the developer take a look and fix the problem.

There’s so much there!

While we’ve jumped deeply into the Atlassian Cloud, we have only just started to scratch the surface. There’s still so much more that we have yet to utilize. We’d love to hear from our fellow Atlassian Cloud users with ways that they’ve utilized this great set of tools.

A note on the pictures

While this is a totally serious blog post (we really do love Atlassian and can’t imagine how we’d operate without them), the pictures that we used are free stock images made by the cast of the new Vince Vaughn movie, Unfinished Business. Anyone who has searched for decent stock images knows how utterly ridiculous business stock images are. I had been thinking of writing this blog post for a while, and when I saw these images, I knew that I had the perfect stock photos to accompany it. Thanks Vince Vaughn and THANKS Atlassian!

What does The Nature Conservancy have in common with Dow Chemical Company?

Surprisingly, more than one might imagine. For one thing, they are both working with The Gartrell Group… and on the same project!
As D.T. Max explores in the New Yorker article “Green is Good,” The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is in the process of adopting a new approach to nudge commercial interests to adopt greener management and operational strategies.

We are very excited to participate in this historic project and to build the software tools described in Max’s article. The tablet-based solution will offer an array of cool capabilities Dow staff may use for identifying, delineating, and monitoring the natural resource “assets” and ecosystem services present on their properties. They will also be able to perform modeling of alternative land uses to assess the impacts of different management strategies.

Designing and developing this solution is bringing together many of the tools and areas of expertise that have been called for in our recent projects.

Mobile

The solution will primarily be used by people working in the field, so it will be aimed at mobile users. The first iteration of the tool will be built on iOS for use on iPads.

Disconnected Editing

Field work usually involves being in remote areas with little-to-no connectivity. This solution, like others that we’ve worked on recently, will allow users to make edits while in the field. Those edits will be loaded onto the cloud as soon as the device is connected to either a cell connection or Wi-Fi.

Cloud Hosting

The data will live in a secure, hosted environment that will ensure that everyone is always working with the mot recent information.

Web Management Tools

Like many of our recent projects that involve mobile users going out into the field, this solution will include a web-based management tool. This tool allows managers to create projects for field workers. These projects include maps and data that are then downloaded to the field worker’s iPad so that they have the most recent data to work with.

Processing Models

A key element to this project is to quantify the impact of different resource management strategies on the ecosystems within which Dow properties are involved. We will be working closely with stakeholders from both Dow and TNC as well as scientists from Ecometrix Solutions Group to develop these tools in the form of data processing models that measure the impacts of different land uses and activities.

This is an exciting collaboration - one that we’d have had a hard time believing could exist twenty years ago. We feel that it is part of a significant shift in the economics of environmentalism and capitalism, one focused on bringing more green to the bottom line.