Greetings!
Welcome to the latest edition of the Informer. This week, we are exhibiting at the GE Users Conference, so this seemed like a great time to update you on the latest happenings at iFactor. I hope many of you in attendance will stop by our booth and say hello. And, if you have a colleague at the conference, drop them a note so they know to stop by for a chance to win a free iPad!
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GE Smallworld Users Conference Product Demos
Storm Center with weather animation
The leading solution for outage communications on the web just got a bit cooler, with the addition of digital radar data from WeatherBug. Storm Center now feeds live data from PowerOn to the web and overlays detailed weather to provide a clear picture for your customers. You can check this out at our booth along with support for tracking historic data and Smartphone applications.
Proactive outage communications
iFactor's Notifi interfaces to PowerOn to provide a complete customer communications solution. See how Notifi can alert customers to predicated and confirmed outages, update them on ETR and restoration information, and even allow customers to report an outage with just a few key strokes using our innovative 2-way texting interface.
Web Maps Connector with weather information, parcel layers, and route finder
The Web Maps Connector product has two new datasets in its growing library of basemaps: parcel boundary data from Digital Map Products, and Doppler Radar from WeatherBug. Check out Solutions News below for more details on how you can use these great new datasets! WMC also includes the Route Finder. This GUI uses the Bing Routing Web Service to provide directions between multiple waypoints. A user can add waypoints by using the trail or by selecting geometries on the map. The result is a highlighted route on the map that shows the shortest path between each waypoint.
Cross Phasing in PowerOn
Ever needed to restore an outage with a phase other than the original phase? Core PowerOn doesn't allow it, but with the Cross-phasing module from iFactor, you can feed a de-energized single-phase with some other single-phase. Customers are properly restored on the new phase. And when the cross-phased situation is removed, everything goes back to normal.
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Solutions News
Web Maps Connector (WMC) has recently added two new datasets to its growing library of basemaps. The
first is parcel boundary data from Digital Map Products
(http://www.digimap.com). ParcelStream™ is a nationwide parcel boundary
solution that bundles access to parcel boundary data with mapping
display technologies. Now with WMC integration, Smallworld users can
view parcel boundaries as another layer in Smallworld. Digital Map
states that they have "over 100 million US parcels covering all cities
with population greater than 100,000". In our review, we also found
parcel information for cities with significantly less population than
100,000 (see Sumas, WA pop. 960)! Future releases of WMC will enable
users to select these parcel boundaries for detailed attributes.
Our
second addition to our basemap library is Doppler Radar from WeatherBug
(http://www.weatherbug.com). With this layer users can see near
real-time Doppler Radar coverage in Smallworld as another layer. With
this functionality, users can easily see which of their assets are being
subject to sever weather events. Web Maps Connector also implements a
continuous-loop weather animation feature that shows the weather data up
to 3 hours back.
As mentioned in an earlier post from our blog, our Version Viewer product can be used to inspect attribute and geometry differences between alternatives or checkpoints. We will now describe how Version Viewer can be used to copy data between alternatives to solve a tricky data conflict issue in Physical Network Inventory (PNI).
In PNI, buildings, floor, rooms, racks, equipment, ports, and connections are all related in a well-defined hierarchy. This also means that data conflicts are likely to occur if any of those objects in the hierarchy are touched.
For example, user A creates a design and makes a number of connections at the equipment level of a particular building. At the same time, user B creates her own design and modifies that same building's outline geometry to better match the real world footprint of that building. When user B is finished with the job, she posts her building changes up. There are no conflicts. Finally, user A has completed his port connection work and decides to refresh his design. At this point he is presented with a conflict. The conflict occurs because both the building and some of its substructure have been changed in two separate alternatives. The conflict detector only provides the option of selecting all the parent changes or all the child changes. Some work will get lost. So user A decides in favor of the "child" changes in order to preserve all his port/connectivity work. But by doing so, he has discarded the building outline changes made by user B. If she doesn't intervene soon, user B's changes will be lost forever.
The one option is to ask user B to redo her building geometry changes. The other option is for user A to use the Version Viewer to recover the "lost" data. Easy enough, user A launches the Version Viewer while in his design. Then he selects the building in the parent alternative and his own design alternative and indicates that he wants to copy the buildings outline geometry down into his own alternative. That's it. The geometry is copied down into the design alternative and when his design is posted up, a copy of the building outline done by user B will be retained in the top alternative.
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View a demo for any of our exciting new products and submit your business card in the raffle. Or Tweet about @iFactor and the #swuc to enter twice! The winner will be announced on Twitter before the closing ceremony on Saturday.