Tuesday, August 7, 2018

Good conduit/fiber mapping and documentation solutions?

*edit* Downvotes for some reason.. just to be clear, while I reference ArcMaps a lot in this, I'm not necessarily looking for specific software support unless someone happens to have some experience with it for telecom mapping. Any suggestions on other solutions would still be greatly appreciated. I know this isn't as sexy as a routing problem or something but it's still network documentation... unless there is a better subreddit I should be using?

So I've got a project involving future planning for conduit/vault/box and fiber locations and paths. To plan for the future, I figured it would be best to also show what we already have so I spent a few days in Google Earth and came up with something useable that has groups that can kind of act like layers to show or hide things. It isn't 100% accurate and I eyeballed everything instead of using GPS coordinates for the first pass but it was a decent proof of concept.

My boss liked the output but would like to find something a bit more maintainable and cross platform than just leaving the file up on Dropbox. He recommended ArcGIS since we apparently have some licenses from another department on campus.

I found this on their website and really liked it:

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=b6da3cf757de41c0bb1c85417888d984#

Things I like about this particular example:

  • It's a web application so pretty much anyone we want should be able to view it on most any device without worrying about them accidentally editing something
  • I think it's easily maintained if I understand the principle correctly... I think you'd update the map in ArcMap and then publish it again
  • Popups have the ability to add nice data like fiber strand count, coordinates, etc.
  • The layer behavior is cool... zoom out and it's a conduit map... zoom in and it's a fiber bundle map
  • The aerial and satellite imagery is newer than what seems to be available on Google Maps or Earth

So I spun up ArcMap and try to follow the "tutorial":

https://solutions.arcgis.com/telecommunications/help/core-maps/get-started/setup-map-network/

I've come to the conclusion that ArcMaps is the most un-intuitive piece of software I've ever used (congrats Blender, you're #2 now). After finally figuring out how to get coordinates to line up between the basemap layer and other layers I then started beating my head against the desk trying to figure out how to "Add the network map service to the map" like it says in the tutorial. I think I finally figured out how to do it, only to find out that the layers are all locked and it really just seems to dump the data from the sample application in.

I don't mind a challenge and I think the software looks incredibly powerful but I'm not sure I have time right now to design and program a custom ArcMap from scratch instead of just working with a template.

Anyone know of any good solutions to do this kind of thing or have experience with ArcMaps and know of some good resources that might make this easier?



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