It’s been a couple months since any of my customers asked for maps, so when one of them surprised me with a last minute request last Thursday while onsite for a ‘regular’ progress update video, I said sure and did a couple flights to capture site prep images for a 1.4 MSF logistics building. Get home, upload the images, check the results, everything looks great. Spent Friday producing the progress update video, getting ready this morning (Saturday 09/09/17) to send everything off, including links to DD maps. I renew my monthly Pro plan, start what I expected to be the same process, only to find that the way your sharing operates has significantly changed! I don’t want my customer to have to sign up for a free account in order to see the maps, nor will they want to share the maps with their stakeholders and require all of them to sign up for a free account. The way it used to work was send a link (or put the link behind a click through image on a private page of my website,) my customer clicks on the link, and boom, they see the image. They can manipulate it for simple viewing, which is all they want and that’s all I want them to have! Now, unless I’m missing something, when they get a ‘shared’ link, it takes them to a page that requires them to first understand how to navigate your user interface, how to select which maps, raises questions about other DD features, etc.
Not happy to find out (over the weekend when chat support is not available) that what I consider to be a major feature has now turned into what appears to be a marketing ploy to gather as many new suspects for your products instead of supporting the needs and expectations of your current customers!
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Hi DoveAerial
Agreed, your customers shouldn’t need to sign in. Just copy the ‘share link’ with your customers - and they will now be able to see al l the data you’ve collected for them.
This was a much requested feature. Let me know what you think. It also doesn’t say DroneDeploy anywhere on the page, although there are sign in/log in buttons.
Hey Mike,
Thanks for the response. I understand my customers won’t have to sign up or log in, but what do you think the lay person who sees this first page is going to do when the upper left corner have the words ‘Sign Up’ and ‘Log In?’ The problem I have with this new way of displaying shared maps is that now I have to either hope they don’t get lost trying to muck around in a new (to them) user interface or I have to write up a ‘how to navigate’ document that goes along with the shared link. I’ll have to explain that interesting features they’re naturally going to want to explore like the annotation and measurement tools will require a subscription. This returns me to my original complaint: I just want them to see (and share) a specific map, I don’t want them (or their stakeholders) to have to figure out how to use DD, with or without a login. I understand your corporate customers probably like this method because when they share a map, it helps them advance user acceptance and deployment within their company which of course generates new license revenue for you. But for guys like me, this method could in some situations create competition for part of my services, and I hope you understand that’s something that will eventually cause me (and I suspect others in my same situation) to evaluate other mapping alternatives (which of course I don’t want to do, I really like DD’s capabilities and have been a fan and advocate since October 2015.)
Since the links generated by the prior method appear to still be working, please bring that ‘simple’ method back as a choice for sharing maps.
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Ok. I understand.
This feedback has been shared with the product team.
