• Be able to look up all of the work he has done at a particular facility.  Each facility is roughly 100k square feet so a single, ongoing report per facility will not work.
• Be able to quickly look at the maintenance history of a particular entity inside the facility such as a boiler or compressor.
• Group each individual maintenance job on an individual report so the media and documentation can be communicated to the customer on a single report.

After thinking about the set up for this, it seemed like a great topic for a blog post as it could hopefully help out quite a few users become acquainted with some of the more advanced capabilities of the site.

The first step is to go into the "my Contacts" section and create a contact record for the particular building you're working with.  Here's how I filled mine out:

Note that I used a "Commercial" contact instead of the default choice of "Residential".  This gives me a Company field which makes more sense to use than trying to fit a building name into the First and Last name fields.

Next, click on the "Contacts" tab at the bottom when you're viewing the contact record for our "Engineering Building" in my case, or whatever you have called yours.  You'll see a button with a person and a plus sign that allows you to create a sub-contact related to our "Engineering Building".  Use this to create a record for your piece of equipment.  Here, I called it "Compressor".

Now, I'm ready to create my reports.  Fill out the fields on the report as you normally would and add all of the media from the current job you've worked on.  Add the person or company's name you want to show up on the report in the "Customer" area.  Add both the building contact record and piece of equipment's contact record in the "Contacts" section.  These names/records won't show up on the report someone you send it to sees but is our key link for organizing these reports.

In the future, you can go back to the "my Contacts" section and pull up either the contact record for the building you're at, or for an individual piece of equipment and use the reports tab at the bottom to see all of the reports you've created there.

1.    Remove Duplicates - One piece of media can be associated to (put on) several reports. There is no need to upload the same media more than once! To check for duplicate media, navigate to the "My Media" section of the site and change the media pane to "Detail View" (the horizontal bars just to the right of the words "Change View"). Here, you can sort your media by file name and easily discover and remove duplicates.

2.    Remove Unassociated Media - Have media that is floating around in your “My Media” section that is not associated with a report? Consider deleting it! If the media is not on a report, it’s not doing work for you and is costing you space! Remember, deleting a piece of media will cause it to no longer be backed up by RIDGIDConnect.

3.    Use Images - Does an image tell the story? If your video isn’t clear or has minutes upon minutes of cloudy footage, consider going into the video and extracting still frames of the key points by selecting that option when creating bookmarks. Then, you can always delete the video from your account and just work with the images.  Only the images you extract will count against your storage quota. However, your video will no longer be backed up by RIDGIDConnect.

4.    Reduce Video Size - It’s no surprise that lengthy videos take up a significant amount of space. However, adjusting attributes such as the frame rate, resolution, and autolog quality (HQ) can help reduce the size of videos. Check your camera's software settings for more information.

Express is immediately attractive to you when you go to sign up because, yes, it's free.  Obviously, we can't offer you all of the features of the site, since we still have our own bills to pay, but allow us to help you understand the pros and cons of Express, so you can best decide which level you should sign up for.

An Express level account differs from a Basic level in quite a few ways.  The three most important ways are the amount of storage you have, the number of reports you can keep on the site, and the types of files you can share on those reports.  We'll cover the minor differences later but for now, we'll focus on these three.

Storage Limits

Sign up for a new Express account and you'll receive 0.5 GB of storage, 1/20th of the 10 GB of storage on a Basic account.  This will still give you enough space to store a significant amount of photos but will greatly reduce the number of videos you can store on the site.  This might not be a big deal to you, though, when we look at our next major difference: the types of files you can share on reports.

File Type Limitations

A RIDGIDConnect Basic account will let you attach and share any type of file that you have whether it's a video (.avi, .mov, .3gp, .wmv, etc.), image (.jpg, .bmp, .png, .gif, etc.), or other (.doc/.docx, .xls, .pdf, CAD, etc.).  Express will only allow you to upload the video and image file types.  Express will take that a step further and only allow you to attach the image types to the "Public Media" section of a report which is the section visible to those you share the report with.  What's the best way to handle this?  By uploading your inspection video, using the bookmark and image extraction tools to pull the frames out of the video that highlight the issues, and using those to build your report that you share.

Number of Reports

Next, an Express account is limited to 50 active reports at any time.  This isn't a big deal if you only do 1-2 inspections per month.  If you do more than that, however, you'll probably want to think about a Basic or higher level account so you can store all of your past reports and reference them should you need to make a repeat or annual visit to a location you've already inspected.  Also, should you need to share the inspection material with someone else in the future, you'll want to make sure you have the report still stored on your account so you can share it again with only a few clicks.

Other Restrictions

Finally, an Express account cannot take advantage of a few other features that are available to Basic or higher level users.  These include the mobile apps for BlackBerry and Android that allow you to upload images and video from your Smart Phone, the dispatch application currently available on BlackBerry, Contact Management features built into your address book, mapping of the contacts in your address book on a Bing Map, and the security features on reports such as limiting the number of views or setting an expiration date on a customer's access.

We're always looking for ideas and suggestions so let us know if there's something you could find extremely helpful on the site or need a better explanation of anything!

For those that aren't aware, SeeSnake HQ is the software running on your laptop that allows you to record the footage from your SeeSnake reel directly to your laptop when using your RIDGID LT1000.  You can download HQ, here.

First, once you've got your job created in HQ, you'll want to switch over to the "Report" tab.

Finding the Report Tab!

Once there, click on the "Upload" button that is now available.

The "Upload" button...

If this is your first time here, it will ask you for your RIDGIDConnect credentials.  Enter the same user name and password combination you use to sign into the RIDGIDConnect website.

HQ Asking for your RC Credentials

Once you're successfully logged in, you'll note that the tab above the report now shows "Logout myUsername" in red.  Clicking this will log you out of your RIDGIDConnect account from inside HQ.

Logged In and the "R" Upload Button

Now, all you need to do is click the "R" logo that is now enabled on the right hand side of the screen.  It has the text "Upload" beneath it.  This will start transferring your files from HQ on your computer to your RIDGIDConnect account online.

My Files Uploading...

Once the transfer bar shows your upload as complete, simply sign into RIDGIDConnect and go to your "my Reports" page to find your report.  The reason for call, description, contacts, media and all titles and descriptions on that media will be transferred over so you don't have to retype it.

As always, let us know if you have any questions!

Here are the items that we're going to cover:

• RIDGIDConnect
• The RIDGIDConnect Client
• RIDGIDConnect Mobile Apps for BlackBerry and Android
• m.ridgidconnect.com
• SeeSnake HQ

RIDGIDConnect

This is the website that serves as the core to what we'll discuss today.  It allows you to store your digital files, keep an address book of your customers, backup your digital media, and share all of this media with your customer as well as communicate back and forth with them.  It is accessible via www.ridgidconnect.com from any computer with access to the internet.  This means your job files are available at your office, your home, on your laptop in the field, your smart phone...basically anywhere you can get an internet connection.

The site is required in order to take advantage of m.ridgidconnect.com, the RIDGIDConnect Client, and the RIDGIDConnect Mobile Apps for BlackBerry and Android.  It is available via a 30-day free trial and monthly or yearly subscriptions that start at $49.99.

The RIDGIDConnect Client

The RIDGIDConnect Client is a piece of software that you can download once you're logged into RIDGIDConnect and installs locally on your computer.  The main benefit of the software is that it is better suited to handle uploading very large video files.  For instance, if you're uploading a large file through the website and you unexpectedly lose your internet connection, you'd have to start the entire upload over.  The Client can handle this interrupted connection gracefully and resume your upload where you left off.

Second, as you've probably experienced in previous encounters with video on the internet, there are many different formats and it's hard to predict if the video you have is going to work on someone else's computer.  As a result, all videos played on RIDGIDConnect are converted to a standard format so we can almost guarantee your customer will be able to access and view the video.  This conversion process happens in one of two spots.  On a file that is uploaded via the website, it is converted after it is uploaded.  With the RIDGIDConnect Client, that software converts it locally on your machine.  The reason for that is as a part of the conversion process, we can use a video compression algorithm prior to upload so that a majority of the time, you will have a smaller file to upload.

The RIDGIDConnect client uses files that are local on your hard drive as well as it has the capability to import videos and images from a DVD created by your inspection camera.

RIDGIDConnect Mobile Apps for BlackBerry and Android

If you have a BlackBerry or Android smart phone, you will want to pay close attention.  Our development team has created applications for these two phone operating systems that install directly onto your phone.  They will tie directly into the cameras on your device and allow you to easily take pictures (such as before & after photos to document your work ) and then upload them directly to a report on your RIDGIDConnect account.

The mobile application space is one that we have a great deal of valuable experience in.  As a previous winner of Research In Motion's (BlackBerry) Wireless Leadership Award for a CRM product we developed, you can expect that we will bring this experience to the RIDGIDConnect environment and make sure you have an industry leading mobile experience.  Stay tuned for exciting announcements here!

m.ridgidconnect.com

This refers to a website that is specially formatted to be accessed from your mobile phone.  At the time of this blog it allows you to do everything you can on the full RIDGIDConnect website with the exception being the interaction with videos.  As a convenience, we redirect most devices to this version of the website if you type in www.ridgidconnect.com.  You use the same user name and password here that you do on the regular site.

SeeSnake HQ

HQ is a software product that runs on your laptop and allows you to interact with the files captured by the RIDGID SeeSnake product line (such as the LT1000).  It allows you to create reports in a format similar to a word document that can be emailed or presented to your customer on a thumb drive.  The reports can contain text, images, or videos (not over email).

This product integrates very well with the RIDGIDConnect website in that it will allow you to send reports that you created in HQ to RIDGIDConnect as well as synchronize your address book between the two so you don't have to worry about duplicate contacts.  HQ also serves as the controller for your camera if you're connected to a LT1000 and will allow you to burn a DVD from the digital media you captured.

So, which one should you choose?  Well, all of them...it depends on what you're trying to accomplish.  Each is an excellent tool but knowing when to utilize them is the key.  Hopefully you've gained a better understanding of your options.  If not, the RIDGIDConnect team is more than happy to discuss this in greater detail with you!  Just use the Feedback or Contact Us feature on RIDGIDConnect!

Then, you come across the form to create the code snippet you need to embed on your site and say, "Whoa, I'm not a web developer, this looks like it's in a foreign language! Well...I'll give it a try."

There's all sorts of strange combinations of letters and numbers but you finally discover that if you click on the little red box you get a pop up with a choice of 100 or so different colors. You find a red that looks similar to your website and decide to go with it. Maybe you customize the text or the size of the box a little bit...but, finally you copy the HTML code snippet at the bottom and get it embedded into your web site. It's close to the right color, not perfect, but that's the best you could do, right? Wrong! Follow along for an easy way to seamlessly produce a "Put RIDGIDConnect On Your Site" box that looks like it has been there all along.

Next to where it says, "Background color" there's a text box with six characters in it. This corresponds to the specific color code that you've selected. It is made up of six characters and each one can range from A-Z and from 0-9. I'll spare you the details, but for more you can read this. If you can't ask your web developer or graphic designer what this value you should be, here's how to get it:

Using Mozilla Firefox as your web browser, you can search for "Add Ons". Click on the "Tools" menu and select "Add Ons" from the drop down that opens. Search for "ColorZilla".

Once you get it installed and open your browser back up, you'll notice that in the bottom left corner there's an eye dropper. If you click on this eye dropper you'll start the ColorZilla add on. It will replace your mouse pointer with a set of cross hairs and as you scroll over your website, you'll see that it gives you the RGB value as well as the six character hexadecimal HTML color code that you need. Simply find the color you want to match with, copy down the six character value as highlighted in the picture below, paste it into the box on RIDGIDConnect, and voila! Your "Put RIDGIDConnect On Your Site" box will be matched perfectly to your website.

As BlackBerry Alliance Select members and with a large percentage of our user base using those devices, you might expect us to only support that platform. Not so, the team is extremely excited to announce the arrival of our Android application that will let you upload the images and videos you capture with your phone directly to reports on RIDGIDConnect.

This tool will allow you to document your work, provide before and after photos, and capture visual references at a rate that was never before possible. Your feedback is extremely valuable to us so we encourage you to click the link below, download and use the application, and then suggest to us what you'd like to see next! You'll also find the installation links to our BlackBerry application on the same page.

Android and BlackBerry Install Page

In other exciting news, we expect to add the capability to watch the videos you’ve uploaded to your RIDGIDConnect reports on your web enabled phone in the very near future. You’ll no longer have to remember to bring the correct DVD or VHS with last year’s inspection along with you to the job, simply pull up the video on your phone and remember exactly what you saw. Watch this blog and our Twitter account for updates!

http://www.ridgid.com/connectinstall.htm

This will work on version 4.6 and higher BlackBerry devices.  This is just a peek at what the developers are working on these days.  It is by no means a final product, but I have been using it for a few days without issues.  If you have any feedback or ideas, please leave them for us!

By the way, there is no added cost to using this with your existing RIDGIDConnect account!

Here are a three ways our current customers are using RIDGIDConnect to grow their business...

• Using reports to demonstrate capabilities to customers. http://bit.ly/dw1jWw
• Adding supporting literature about your company to all of your reports to help promote your other offerings or further explain your offering. http://bit.ly/dAjhZp
• Advertising online report retrieval from their website... http://neptuneplumbing.net/

How are you using RIDGIDConnect to grow your business?  Leave me a comment and let me know.

Let me start with the good. It has a ton of very cool apps. Of those apps, there aren't many I expect to use on a regular basis. They are creative in how they integrate the camera and GPS, but they just aren't useful for much more than showing off the phone.

It is a WiFi hotspot for my other devices! It is very simple to activate the hot spot feature and get other devices on the net in seconds. That means my Evo, iPhone, iPad, laptop and Blackberry can all share the same internet plan. Picture this: You are trying to get a wireless signal from your laptop in a basement during a job, but you just don't get cell coverage. Well, you could not connect via wifi to your hot spot sitting on the main floor. Pretty cool trick to extend wireless access that you cant do with tethering or an aircard.

This EVO just doesn't have as polished of an experience for navigation and messaging that a Blackberry does, but for internet browsing it rocks(Flash support! ...kinda). It sports the popular WebKit based browser that the higher end mobile phones all seem to be running now. This is coming to Blackberry in their new devices this year!

So what is disappointing about this device? It is big and clunky for one. As I stated before the navigation between apps isn't great. The on-screen keyboard is a pain to deal with when you are entering data in form fields. It is also difficult to type while doing something else and looking away from the keys like you can on a Blackberry. The speed of the processor in this thing comes at a price: battery life! Oh, and if you happen to have some divx movies you want to watch, think again. There isnt support for the amount of media players that you have on the Blackberry.

Overall, it is a very cool device for some niche applications. If you are on the thing all of the time messaging, tweeting, face booking, or talking, then you might want another device.

What does this mean for RIDGIDConnect? Some of you already know about our mobile client that will be released soon based off our award winning CRM Application. Expect to see a media uploader come out first. Along with the Blackberry uploader, we are working on an Android based one as well. Most of the professionals we have seen use a Blackberry, but we know there are other devices being used. If we see enough activity in this area from our customers, you can expect to see a lot more attention paid to this area to remain a top mobile development company.

What device do you carry today? What will your next mobile device be?