Google Maps for Business

Google recently invited us to attend the recent Pinpoint event in London. The idea was for us to evaluate the products and services Google can offer in the geo-location and mapping arena.

We're familiar with the web based Google Maps API. It's amazingly simple to use, offers a very rich UI and most importantly, we have shown this to our end users who instantly recognise and know how to use the user interface.

In Google's favour, the mapping views, overlays and ability to create heat maps are second to none. Coupled with the StreetView feature, Google have built an amazingly powerful product that we were excited to start implementing into our software.

However, the message from the event was very much "We're ready for business". I believe Google Maps solutions are far from ready for this task and here are my main reasons;

Routing (Navigation) is incredibly basic. Although Google do have the "beta" moniker on the turn by turn navigation, it is definitely flogging the maps routing as a genuine business product. I beg to differ. There is no ability to avoid certain map location points; imagine you receive data that warns you of a closed road - your planning agents cannot mark this on the map for the routing software to react to this. There is no ability to route for large vehicles, avoiding low bridges or weight restrictions. For taxi drivers, there is no way to include bus lanes in your directions. As a business user this is quite frustrating when you know that nobody can collect, handle and interrogate data quite like Google but they seem to be avoiding some pretty basic projects here.

If you thought it easy to get your directions from elsewhere and overlay them into Google Maps, think again. Mapping software products generally do not play well with each other and you will invariably end up with situations where the directions overlay is placed over an area without a road on the other map.

During the event we were introduced to Google Coordinate. For those unfamiliar, the product allows you to create work flows, assigning jobs to remote workers who can pick them up on their mobile devices, see job info, navigate to the job and will be forced to complete certain mandatory fields before the job is marked as complete. The product shows a lot of promise and I can certainly see the use for companies without their own information systems departments. However, this product again seems to follow the recent trend of Google releasing products that simply aren't ready. When configuring your work flow, you can add mandatory fields that you require the remote worker to complete before the job is closed. These fields are free text so you cannot add, for example, a drop down list of options for the remote worker to choose from. I cannot understand the rationale behind this - it is woefully too simple to be useful in many business scenarios.

So we arrived at Google Pinpoint 2012 fairly confident we needed to buy the Google Maps API for our business and left feeling fairly confident that Google Maps couldn't do what we needed.

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