Mapping with Smartsheet Labs

Monika Vermeulen

My company is a private emergency response service. We were very excited when Smartsheet Labs came along and presented us with the ability to map our clients adresses. However this feature turned out less than great due to it using Bing rather than google maps. Adresses that should be easy to locate simply wont map on Bing. I have a long list of addresses that give me errors and some map in the wrong town even thou the town was stipulated. I hope to fix this by adding GPS coordination instead off the address, but this doesn't seam to be a functioning feature. This is very important to us as I need to be able to send accurate information to my medics. Is this something that will be improved on at any time?

Alex Vorobiev

Monika, thanks for asking.  The reason we use Bing in Smartsheet Labs is simply because it's cheaper.  Google Maps licensing is more restrictive and it is significantly more expensive - end-users don't have to pay to use, but companies that integrate with maps do as soon as the volume of usage reaches a certain level.  It is possible to switch to Google, but we would have to charge you and all other Maps customers a separate fee rather than making it available for free.

Using GPS coordinates (latitude and longitude) should work.  If it doesn't, please contact us at api@smartsheet.com with a sample of data you are trying to map.

Thanks!

Monika Vermeulen

i will test it out quickly - maby there was some improvement from the last time i tried the gps.  will give feedback on my findings.

Monika Vermeulen

I hav etested it and it is completely wrong. only one of the gps locations - wich i looked up on bing - is even in the right town!

I have shared the map so feel free to take a look here: https://smartsheetlabs.com/smartsheetmaps/share/0e21f7bd616072a37b6684e0baca4347fbb48c4cb37bb525dfe5315ad9791e88

If it means we have to pay extra to get google maps - what would the cost involved be as the current bing version is pretty useless as it is.

Monika Vermeulen

"but companies that integrate with maps do as soon as the volume of usage reaches a certain level." - please explan what this means?

Alex Vorobiev

Monika - I will check the data set you provided and will respond to you through our ticketing system, thank you for sharing it.

WRT to Google Maps - as I mentioned earlier, using Google Maps at high volume (as would be the case with us and lots of Smartsheet users using the integration) is expensive.  At some point we may make a decision to transition to Google Maps, but today as we continue to provide the Smartsheet Labs service free of charge, we can only do so via Bing.

Tim McCarthy

Alex,

 

I have also found that some of my sites get mapped incorrectly. At least they stay in the right city but even being a few blocks off or on the incorrect side of the street is not satisfactory for locating buildings and/or equipment. FYI, the facilities I track are in Ohio.

GPS coordinates work great!