Tracking: General information

Tracking management is a way to get/store/display geographic position of users mobile equipments inside Nomadia Field Service and use it through many functions (find missions around, find customer around, planned/realised tour comparison, find co-workers around, find nearest technicien for emergency...)

There are many ways to get mobile position:

Each binding point can embed up to 5 custom actions
by integrating position from OTMobile (Nomadia Field Service mobile solution on IOS and Android)
by integration position from your own GPS location source

Then, there are many ways to display that information:

inside Nomadia Field Service appointment sheet
inside Nomadia Field Service tracking module

So, there are 2 major uses in function of your need:

realtime move tracking and storing position (history management)
last position storing without history management

In the first use, you have to send position to a specific server (GC-LOCATION) managed by Nomadia company.
Nomadia do not use theses positions for its own use. It's only a cloud storage service Nomadia.
In the first use, you have to send position to your Nomadia Field Service.

In function of your usage, you can use one service or the other or both

The technical way to use theses services and information stored are differents

Please note Nomadia do not track users but user's equipment. That equipment has to be designed to offer the user a way to disable the tracking function.

Use case

Use third-party software positions storage components:
In that use case, GPS locations are gotten by the third-party company and stored into its position server. Nomadia Field Service provides connectors to recover positions.
Generally a tracker need to be installed into each vehicle.
Use that kind of storage if you want to:
- install GPS tracker into each vehicle of your fleet
- store a lot of positions
- manage historic and be able to retrieve and display old tracking traces outside Nomadia Field Service
- see only the latest vehicule position into Nomadia Field Service
Use Nomadia software positions storage components:
In that use case, GPS locations are got by the Nomadia Field Service mobile from Nomadia company or any other Nomadia partners using Nomadia tracking API getter/setter position (Nomadia Location Server. Nomadia Field Service provides 3 ways to get and display stored positions:
- through a connector to recover latest vehicles positions and display them into Nomadia Field Service
- through an API to recover all positions you've stored before
Use that kind of storage if you want:
- do not install GPS tracker into each vehicle of your fleet, but use mobile phone GPS
- store a lot of positions
- manage historic and be able to retrieve and display old tracking traces
- compare planned tours and realized tours/moves
Use Nomadia Field Service last position storage:
In that use case, GPS locations are got by the Nomadia Field Service and store into an appointment field in the Nomadia Field Service DB. Older positions are updated by the new ones, and older are forgotten.
Use that kind of storage if you want:
- store only lastest positions
- no management of historic tracking positions
- no need of realtime position (refreshing vehicle position each 10 minutes for instance)

Parameters

You can select the tracking service to use from the admin menu Mobility > Settings by selecting the position server.
The default tracking service is the first described in the %CONFIG%/param/tracking_config.xml file

To use tracking services, you need to manage some entities into Nomadia Field Service (mandatory).

Technician (Human resource)
Equipment (ie tracking equipment or mobile device)
Vehicle

Once the different entities created, you need to define the assignments between them through the Admin module > Mobility > Assignments menu

Then, if you use a third-party software positions storage component, it needs to be configured as well and the identifier of each defined equipment must be in accordance.

If you use the Nomadia software positions storage component, you can synchronize your equipments with the storage component by clicking on the "synchronize" button in the tracking equipment's page.