Trimble Business Center

Not sure how I missed this with the latest release of TBC and the ANZ toolbox, but it's finally here! A points to point cloud delta report! This is a super cool tool. I believe it's just under $400/yr to add to an existing TBC subscription and it's one of 50+ tools that are extremely useful. If you have a TBC perpetual license, I believe it's around just over $200 one time but you'd need to be on TBC 2025.21. See here for more on this wonderful toolset: Points to Cloud Report – TBCANZ. Also, some other tools that I find really helpful: Remove Duplicates – TBCANZ, Adjust Profile – TBCANZ, Surface Cleanup – TBCANZ, Edit Linestring Elevation – TBCANZ, Insert Vertices from Points – TBCANZ, Points from Chainage Offset – TBCANZ, Grid Volume from Boundary – TBCANZ.<u5:p></u5:p>

Rather questionable that an employee of a Trimble reseller celebrates to pay for add-ons which should clearly be out of the box. Pretty much everything that AnzToolbox, and Rockpile for that matter, provide are workarounds and less-clicking tools that Trimble should have incorporated into the core product a long time ago.

We're paying maintenance fees after all. And in the last few years there was basically nothing of real value in the releases for a "survey advanced" or even "pointcloud" license, and way too many bugs are still unresolved. See my personal bug tracking list here https://1drv.ms/f/c/e8b766b43a916613/IgDos-zzbQrKS6kShNfuLxZFAXUdk8SqP2Uh01xIEnmdbYQ?e=dxCguO

I work on high value/volume civil projects and had to write lots of macros on my own, despite paying maintenance fees and providing detailed feature requests and bug reports to our dealer. Which by the way is the AnzToolbox developer, I get it for free, so you might think I shouldn't complain. But I do find that unique deal with Trimble, that it's included/shipped/distributed/advertised with the TBC installer rather disturbing. Trimble is too lazy or deliberately unwilling to act on customer requests, who pay maintenance fees, and then provides a solution via extra fee addons from one of their resellers, organized and sold through their reseller network???? If I'm the only one who finds this weird and kind of unethical then please excuse me.

Some of the AnzToolbox add-ons are previous Trimble sample macros that are now maintained by them instead by Rockpile. It's not easy to find at all which, but some of those seem to only require the Survey Advanced license, no extra fee. But it isn't very obvious, it's hidden in the release notes or the single function webpages. Convert to linestring was a free sample macro and now seems to be to pay for only though.

Some are blatant copies of my freeware macros.

And some of the sample macros have made their way into the core product meanwhile, i.e. offset/explode surface.

When 'Measure Overhead Line Clearance' came out, I made a request for the ability to compare a point to a point cloud, as well as lines to a surface.