How would you...

AHarvey · 9 Aug 2016 at 21:12

Hi,

If someone said to you:

"we need something where you can enter a postcode and see which 3 remote workers are closest to that postcode and include travel distance and time"

How would you go about it?

Other requirements:

has to be accessible to up to 10 people at once
Accessible for people in different locations
easy to edit (enter new remote workers, edit or remove them)
simple to use
accurate.

Now, I have been looking at using googlemaps api to create a custom map showing area managers and their staff all over England and Wales, buttons to allow you to select/deselect them etc. Attached to a simple dbase table and admin panel for entering/editing info.

it means me learning a lot of new technologies but that's what I am thinking to solve this issue.

How would you go about it?

jsmoke · 9 Aug 2016 at 21:35

Could do it a few ways, database and some GUI frontend in C#/VB/C++/PHP, or download a tool like grep for windows and see what you can do with it.

Mynight · 9 Aug 2016 at 22:43

Are the remote workers mobile or fixed locations?

AHarvey · 9 Aug 2016 at 23:58

3 offices all fixed locations, however, there will be people remote who will want to access it. Directors and managers etc.

McBain · 10 Aug 2016 at 08:17

You pretty much summed up my thoughts on it already, Google Maps API and a front end in whatever fashion you like, with a database to hold the data of locations.

radderfire · 10 Aug 2016 at 11:19

AHarvey said:
How would you go about it?

Look for an out of the box solution. There is bound to be one. Lots of telematics companies will do this.

AHarvey · 10 Aug 2016 at 12:31

Thanks for input and suggestions so far

radderfire said:
Look for an out of the box solution. There is bound to be one. Lots of telematics companies will do this.

I can't get them to buy me a teamviewer licence, a £7 extension cable or velcro cable ties....I won't get extra software unless I write it myself or it's free.

nightmare99 · 10 Aug 2016 at 12:53

Sounds like a ridiculous way to run a business to me.

AHarvey · 10 Aug 2016 at 13:04

nightmare99 said:
Sounds like a ridiculous way to run a business to me.

It is when they are actively recruiting financial advisors with an OTE of £100k.

I know that is possible for them, I've worked with our consultants and one made £21k a in a month from commission.

However, if I turned up for an interview here and they were telling me i'd earn £100k a year I'd laugh my backside off because you would think it was all talk as it's dated to hell.

When I first started they gave me a £250 argos PC to use, then asked me to do graphical work on it... I've finally got an i7 16gb system from them but only because it was left over after a dev left.

radderfire · 11 Aug 2016 at 10:30

Whether it can be done more cheaply by you depends on how good you are at coding I guess. There might be something open source you could use so I would take a look at GitHub maybe. The other thing is that Google+ does have a location feature, so maybe you can leverage that in some way.

roccles · 11 Aug 2016 at 11:37

AHarvey said:
It is when they are actively recruiting financial advisors with an OTE of £100k.

I know that is possible for them, I've worked with our consultants and one made £21k a in a month from commission.

However, if I turned up for an interview here and they were telling me i'd earn £100k a year I'd laugh my backside off because you would think it was all talk as it's dated to hell.

When I first started they gave me a £250 argos PC to use, then asked me to do graphical work on it... I've finally got an i7 16gb system from them but only because it was left over after a dev left.

Let me guess the consultants also have nice high spec laptops which are way overspecced for their needs.

Armageus · 11 Aug 2016 at 12:16

As others have said an off the shelf system will likely be the easiest option, but as said comes at a cost.

Equally though, google maps isn't actually free for business use, and any kind of business usage will likely hit the limitations of the free api.

OpenStreetMap https://www.openstreetmap.org is a free option for the mapping side , although you likely will still need a paid for Geocoding service for some of the required functionality.

As another option (and since you mention VB) - as a proof of concept at low cost, it may be worth picking up an old copy of Microsoft Mappoint (e.g. 2004 or 2006 can be had for ~£30 used), as that has an ActiveX control you can drop into VB (or any language that can deal with it), and includes mapping, geocoding, route costing etc, although obviously would only have older maps.

h4rm0ny · 13 Aug 2016 at 11:36

AHarvey said:
Thanks for input and suggestions so far

I can't get them to buy me a teamviewer licence, a £7 extension cable or velcro cable ties....I won't get extra software unless I write it myself or it's free.

Work in a better company. That is absurd.

On topic, I would start here:

http://www.microsoft.com/maps/choose-your-bing-maps-API.aspx

Build yourself a small site that the location can be entered into and use the API commands to generate a route from X, Y and Z to the specified location. I haven't done this, but I think you should be able to extract the distances and then just compare them for the greatest. Do it all in Javascript on the client side (browser) and there's no need for complex coordination between clients.