Software, to share physical locations of members of a group?

Question

I work at a highway construction company, where at any given time, there are three to four work crews at different locations or towns In The Middle Of Nowhere. Right now, the guys in the office have paper maps on the wall, with pins stuck at each town or location, for each crew. This works well enough, but has to be manually updated, and isn't accessible once you leave the office(s).

A software solution would be nice. I'm picturing something like a snapshot of Google Maps, with icons of pins stuck into the map. If the locations of those pins was done with a sister app on an iPhone/Android device, that would be a nice bonus. (iPhone App preferred, since most guys use iPhones, but about 10% of us have Androids.) e.g. The guys push a button which grabs the location of the nearest town, or their exact GPS coordinates if farther than 25 km from a town. Sort of like checking into locations on Facebook, but I want a standalone software package, so it's more robust and has a dedicated, clean interface for this task. Furthermore, it should be a manual check-in/location-update, so that the guys know when they are actively giving their location away. i.e. They need to feel safe that I'm not spying on them every minute of the day, or on their personal time/days off.

Is there any software that can do this kind of thing?

(If not, it's no big deal; I can whip up a program/app over the next year or so. This isn't a necessity, and I have a B.Sc in computer science. ;)

Answer 1

Glympse would seem to be a good solution for your use case.

First, it's available for Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, and Blackberry.

Second, when you send someone a "Glympse", you can define how long they can monitor your location. Once that time is up the observer is cut off.

Third, you can "request a Glympse". If someone hasn't checked in in a while, you can ping them to update their location.

It's a consumer product, and it'll require some training (and changed habits) but it seems like it would work for you.

Answer 2

If your crew uses Android Smartphones (Or possibly Windows and iOS as well, although I'm not certain if they have the capability) you can do this using Google Maps, provided there is cell coverage. If you enable Latitude, you can set up a Friends list of other people that can see your location at any given time. You can use it to track individual people, so if an individual moves between crews, you can see that. It's a free option, but there may be some concerns if you ask them to use their personal phones for this.