Not particularly enjoying the most recent overhaul

Analysis - Discussion and Q&A
1

We’ve been using DroneDeploy for around 5 years now for mapping, producing reports, and conducting SWPPP inspections of large-scale solar plants (100 - 1000 acres). I liked the direction that DD was going in but the most recent overhaul seems to make it more focused on building and interior construction and made things more convoluted for these big open projects.

Being able to quickly move through flights chronologically with the dates on the bar at the top of the map, moving through photos of a photo group in the full-screen photo window by clicking on the arrows on either side, and keeping annotations, photos, etc. to the dates they were created on with the option to copy them to another map was a lot more efficient for us.

I see the advantages of what they’ve done for interior construction, but maybe there should be more separation or customization for the needs of the different industries. It’s not a deal breaker at this point, but starting to make me wonder if we should start looking elsewhere.

DD does seem to be making updates more often these days so hoping this can be worked out in the near future.

3 Likes
2

I agree. The problem is that they increasingly are going after bigger customers which increasingly pulls focus from the smaller companies and individual service providers. Buildings are where the real money is that can afford robots and armies of people walking around with 360 cameras so you end up with an entirely different scenario than what got us here over the past 10 years. I have seen many ebbs and flows like this and it will get dialed back in with our feedback but IMO it is going to continue to go this way and it is time for better profile configurations. We already have some rudimentary profile based permissions setup but we need it to go a step further and have the ability to adjust the interface for different functions like in Bluebeam. It asks you what your Industry is and gives you the most common tools for that industry. In this case it should allow for Pilot, Surveyor, Contractor and Analyst roles and have UI’s configured for those use cases but the ability to go back and forth needs to exist a well.

3 Likes