Telecom Capacity Management

How cool would it be...

If you could visualize your desired Service Location(s) via a google map embedded in your app that changes as the data changes; that's one of the benefits of using the Google Maps API in some shape or form in your app. There are a few different ways to interact with the Google Maps API, all of which require that you sign up for an API key. Sign up is really kind of a misnomer b/c the key appears to be generated by a hash algorithm for the URL (not specific to the application on that domain). Anyway...



Simple
- you can view a service location on a map and support zoom in/out to visualize the location in space

Intermediate
- you can view a service locations and all provider location in proximity. this is done through querying proximal service location and plotting them with v/h distances calculated

Expert
- Demand / Service location trend analysis to see hot markets on a map

Salesforce.com, Google Maps for Flex SDK, Flex 3 SDK (the latter two, free and open-source) can get you there. I've proven out, using my weekend hrs and free developer account on SF.com, that you can pass location data to a flex application embedded in a visualforce page that wraps a Google Maps API call. Yeah, that's a mouthful, but it's cool. You can take your Sales/Service Delivery data from Salesforce.com and plot that on a map that is always up to date. Using Flex, you can drop other dimensions on the map as well (like Customer Type or whatever) similar to how you'd use a pivot of this data.

Wanna see? Here it is:



It's important to get the security call right when going from SF.com but it's well worth the result.

I'll pop my code out on google code one of these days and I'll edit this post. For now, trust me, it works

obviously, no error handling and limited functionality, but demonstrated interface from SF.com straight through to google maps api with a flex wrapper. bells & whistles next