Mapping and GIS Solutions Community

Hi

We are new to Terraflex (Premium) but have been using TerrSync with PFO for the last 15 years. We made the jump this year and have been playing around with setting collection and update projects through connect and also through the ArcMap Terra Office plug in. We found that it works to an extent but also some serious limitations that should be addressed in forthcoming releases.

1. How can minor changes to a file GDB in ArcMap be translated through to the field Template? Assuming I had a small spelling error or need to add or remove options from a domain so its available on the field users' choice list? We can add NEW features to a project but cannot RE-publish existing features with minor updates into a GDB. A simple thing such as turning off a field so as it is not available in the template cannot  be undone by a republish. The template is basically locked after the first publish.
2. Exporting to GDB drops map coordinate systems and all domains that were in the template. 
3. The tasks function is excellent and we need a feature where all users who are allocated a task can see which of them were already updated/collected. The cloud based functionality should make this easy to implement so as to avoid multiple field users doing the same feature updates in the field without having any idea that it was done already by a team member. An example here is we have a project to validate 1500 water meters in an area and I allocate the task to 5 filed team members. They are all connected in the field and I need the sync to also update tasks as they are completed by others. 
4. The Terra-Office add-in configuration locks the project on said machine. Is there a way to share projects with full access to a fellow project admin without having to put this configuration file in shared location?

thank you in advance

Regarding number 2, why are you exporting a GDB from connect if you have Terra Office? If you stay in the original GDB, you are in your system. Regarding number 1, you cannot make any changes to the GDB after publishing up to connect from Terra Office. I agree with number 3 and have communicated this to the Trimble Terra Office team as well. There is a way to do number 4 but it's not super clean. I will check my records and get back to you on this. 

@Matthew Morris

@matth

Hi Zach

Thanks for your input.

Regarding number 2  -  Parts of our organization will not be using Terra Office but rather creating projects in Connect and will require the data in a GDB format for our GIS department to consume. We did not see the need for multiple users of Terra-Office. We have requirements to  quickly set up and deploy field data collection projects without  needing the effort of publishing via ArcMap . Also contributing to this is that not all staff are that clued up with using ArcMap and are not familiar with databases and schema rules.

Regarding number 1, From what you have said, any changes we need to make to a GDB will require us to republish a new project map. This will create problems if there are large projects with multiple users attached where a minor update in any of the domains is needed. Are there any workarounds to overwriting the .tmap in Connect with these updates?

Number 3 lets hope for a quick update from Trimble. also please do share your methods to working around no. 4. 

One more thing if you can advise. We inadvertently removed/deleted a template from Connect. This template was created from a published GDB. Is there a place to recover it from or do we delete the map and republish?

Thanks

Hi @Keshlen Reddy. I am the product manager (and sometimes developer) for Terra Office. It's probably more efficient to continue this discussion over email. I would also like to loop in your Trimble Distributor if you can let me know who that is. For the benefit of other readers of this thread, I can provide some additional information on the original questions and the helpful response from @Zach Edwards above.

1. Yes, this has always been a limitation of Terra Office, and Trimble Positions before it. We recognize that it can be inconvient to republish a new project when only a small schema change has been made. This functionality is on our roadmap but I can't commit to a timeline for it. In either event, we would need to start off with a limited number of schema changes that could be propagated up into a published TerraFlex project.
2. A more complete file geodatabase export workflow is enabled through the standalone (not add-in) Terra Office application. If all the non-Esri user is interested in is exports from a TerraFlex Cloud workspace, they would only need a Terra Office Basic subscription.
3. This functionality in TerraFlex is also on the roadmap.
4. Yes, this is possible. The add-in for ArcMap uses a small database (either a Jet/Access .mdb or Sqlite .db) that sits in user profile folder (per-user config) or the programdata folder (per-machine config). There are a few workflows for making this database available to multiple users...but it requires that each user access the mxd and data sources using the exact same path structure. I can follow-up more on this over email although there are likely a few old YouTube videos about this configuration option.

Regards,

Matt