Of the new features rolled out this past week, one of the biggest changes to the Geopointe user experience is the inclusion of places. Previously, anything added to a route had to be a record in Salesforce or you had to know its address to use manual entry. Now, you can search for businesses and landmarks directly within Geopointe.
To start your Places search, you need to go to the Maps screen and click on the new Search tab. There you will find the Places Search. It works much like the Google Maps search nearby function; the Nokia Places API also returns the type of business or location, so you see different icons for coffee shops, restaurants, banks, etc. If I do a search for “coffee” in the downtown area by the Arrowpointe offices, I get a return of some restaurants that serve coffee, as well as coffee shops.
This feature may be most useful to you during routing. If I have a route, and I want to include a lunch break in there, now I can zoom the map to where I expect to be for lunch and determine a lunch location before I arrive, without having to know the address. If you click on the pointer, you don’t have the Salesforce functionality that you would of Salesforce native records, but you do have Geopointe options, including Add to Route.
We’re really excited about this new functionality, and hope that it will make your Geopointe experience even better than before. We’ll continue to look into external services to make Geopointe an even better app.
