Fluke Networks has unveiled a new edition of LinkWare Live™, the cloud-based cable certification project management service. Building on the success of LinkWare Live Essentials, which the company launched at the 2014 BICSI Fall Conference, the new LinkWare Live Professional™ further streamlines workflow for contractor project managers and field technicians, providing cabling certification project status on any smart, mobile device. LinkWare Live Professional supports browser based, remote tester configuration and real-time reconciliation between the project manager’s test setup and the field technician’s uploaded results.
With LinkWare Live Professional, project managers gain more visibility and control on the job site, ensuring their cabling installation projects will be finished on time, leading to more satisfied and faster-paying customers.
“With the launch of LinkWare Live Essentials last year, we helped our Versiv customers save time and money by dramatically simplifying test results management, eliminating problems associated with improper test setups and lost test results,” said Jason Wilbur, vice president and general manager of the datacom installation business unit at Fluke Networks. “Now less than six months later, we are introducing LinkWare Live Professional, which allows project managers, engineers and consultants to properly configure copper and fiber cabling certification projects in the cloud, deploy these configurations to testers in the field at the push of a button, and monitor the actual progress onsite in near real time as technicians sync their test results. With LinkWare Live Professional, they can support their cable installation teams all over the world from anywhere in the world.”
“Our previous method of cable certification was slow and required a lot of manual coordination with jobsites and customers,” said Dustan Buckley, vice president at Extreme Packets, Inc., an infrastructure cabling supplier headquartered in Lubbock, Texas. “LinkWare Live Professional allows us to bypass many of these steps. Our project manager can now set up jobs in advance, go onsite to install the cables, certify them, upload the results and activate everything — all before lunch. We can use any smart device to determine what has and hasn’t been completed.”
Fluke Networks pioneered the direct tester-to-cloud connection with LinkWare Live Essentials, enabling contractors to upload copper and fiber certification test results straight from testers in the field, eliminating wasted time and cutting the risk of lost or corrupt test results. The service became an immediate success, with thousands of new users signed up since its launch.
LinkWare Live Professionalbuilds on those capabilities by offering two-way interaction among the always-mobile project manager, technicians and their test equipment to eliminate errors and monitor job progress. They can now set up new jobs for multiple testers, assign cable IDs and configure test limits with just a few keystrokes, and push them to the cloud for access by testers anywhere in the world.
Once the job is complete, field technicians upload the results directly from the tester to the LinkWare Live cloud service, which automatically assigns copper and fiber test results to the correct project. Project managers can easily verify that results comply with the setup configuration they deployed to their testers and technicians in the field and then more quickly generate LinkWare Reports to deliver to their customer.
LinkWare Live Professionalstreamlines contractor workflows and accelerates payment through a variety of new features:
- Two-way communication between the tester and the cloud
- Simple browser-based test setup and configuration, with the ability to generate cable IDs
- Test setup corrections and updates to Versiv devices without removing them from the field
- Notifications of incorrect test settings
- Free storage of up to 200,000 copper or 10,000 fiber results (links) or a combination of the two
This article was originally posted “Fluke Networks Introduces LinkWare™ Live Professional Edition” from Cloud Strategy Magazine.
