There are two sections in the VIA® administration menu that will control the VIA mobile’s experience when using the app on their phone; the board administration screen and the mobile administration screen. Editing either of these sections will allow you to control the feel of the mobile app as well as show or hide specific information. To get started, you will need to access the administrator menu in VIA. Open a web browser and navigate to https://www.viaboards.com/sign-in login with the email or username provided to you and enter in your password.
Accessing the Administration Menu
To access the administrator menu, click on your name on the top right side of the screen.
This will expand out a menu. If you have access to the Admin section of VIA you will see an option titled Admin in the menu list.
If you do not see the Admin menu item in your menu list you might not have administrative rights in VIA. Contact your system administrator to see about getting rights to this menu.
The administrator section of the screen is organized by listing all the menu categories on the left side of the screen.
When you select an item the main part of the screen will display further details and settings related to the admin section.
In this tutorial we will be focusing on the Boards section and the Mobile Settings section of the admin menu.
Board Settings
When you open up the boards menu you will see all your boards much like the appear in the home VIA screen. You may see more boards than normal since the boards in your home screen are only visible if you are a member of the board but all boards show up in the admin section of VIA.
You can filter the boards by typing into the search button at the top right section of the screen. To edit the settings on your board click simply left click on the board. Not all settings on the board administration screen are related to mobile communications.
This tutorial will only focus on the settings that will effect the VIA® Mobile users experience.
The board color will determine the color that appears when the driver opens an order or segment card. For example, this is what the card looks like when the board setting is purple or blue.
When you are looking at the colors the color with the check mark signifies the current color scheme for the board. To change the color simply click on another color and save your changes by clicking on the save button on the top right side of the board admin screen.
Geo-fence Settings
There are additional settings further down in the board admin screen that will effect how the system is updated. Please note that these settings will not appear on every type of board. Ensure when you are making changes that you have the board where the orders or segments are located open.
The first field on the left side of the screen determines how the workflow will progress the order/segment throughout the life of the trip. Your options are as follows:
- Off – There will be no automation in the trip workflow. The driver will have to manually send back arrival and departure messages to update the card in VIA.
- On – The system is set to full automate the movement of the trip. As the driver passes through the geofence the cards will be updated with arrive and depart messages.
- Prompted – This is a hybrid of the first two options. When a driver passes through a geofence they will be prompted to accept the action. For example, when they drive up to a stop location they will be presented with a popup that they will have to manually click to send the arrive stop.
- Locked – The locked option will completely lock the driver out of overriding the automation. They will not be able to mark a stop as arrived or departed if the geofence does not trigger
To the right of the auto arrive and depart section is an option to allow the VIA Mobile user to complete the stops out of order. This would be used if the driver was not able to complete the stop due to customer/traffic or other reasons.
If VIA is set to make use of the geofencing options than the next field will help determine how big the default geofences will be for each of the locations. By default, this setting is 0.25; however you can make the radius of the default geofences larger or smaller as business requires. If you have specific locations that you would like to customize your geofences for you can do so from within the location board/map view.
If you selected Prompted under the Auto Arrive/Depart field then you will need to set the Reprompt time (min) and the Prompt Time (sec). The prompt time determines how long the message will stay on the device after the geofence has been triggered. The reprompt time will set the length of time that the message will wait before it triggers again. For example, if the driver passes through the geofence they will be prompted to arrive at the stop for 30 seconds (prompt time) and then the message will disappear; however, it will appear again after 2 minutes (reprompt time).