Geocortex Blog

After about 10 months of development, Geocortex Optimizer 1.0 has been released. We’re really excited about it as it has a lot to offer ArcGIS Server and Geocortex Essentials users. It collects lots of data, creates loads of reports and we even managed to fit in a great looking, easy-to-use application to configure it. “Configurator” will provide a nice break from editing those configuration files as we asked our beta testers to do.

It has been an awesome experience to work so hard for so long with such an excellent group of developers. Congratulations to all involved. We also had some great feedback over the last few months from our beta testers and incorporated many of their ideas into 1.0 as well as saved a few of ideas for version 1.1. The winner of the beta program’s IPOD giveaway will be announced shortly. Stay tuned.

Registration is now open for the 4th annual Geocortex User Conference, which will take place April 26-28, 2009 in Victoria, British Columbia.

Like years past, we’ll combine two days of core conference seminars (three tracks: business, Geocortex Essentials fundamentals and advanced IMF/Essentials) with optional pre and post conference training. Look for a new advanced course around Geocortex Essentials customization.

New seminar topics this year include content related to transitioning from Geocortex IMF to Geocortex Essentials, Geocortex Essentials 2.0 and the Geocortex REST API, an introduction to Geocortex Optimizer and advanced Geocortex Essentials configuration. As always, there will be lots of user presentations and a look ahead at what we’re working on for future releases.

Some might notice we’ve dropped the “IMF” off the historic conference title. Though there will be sessions regarding Internet Mapping Framework, emphasis will be on topics related to Geocortex Essentials and the ArcGIS Server platform (including both Web ADF and the new/emerging APIs).

We hope to see you in Victoria in April 2009!

We’re Internet Geographers, but sometimes our customers ask us questions like, “What Content Management System works best with your software?”. They can be complicated questions to answer because it really depends on what your needs are. Do you need multiple authentication methods? What’s your budget? Who will be managing the content, are they web-savvy? What are your privacy needs?

Last April, we faced similar questions when we decided to build a Support Site that would focus on our ArcGIS-generation software. After much deliberation, we decided to use Microsoft’s Sharepoint.

Some of the reasons we selected Sharepoint:

• offers integration with existing systems
• can handle multiple authentication types
• written using a language we work with every day
• has several levels of authentication
• has easy WYSIWYG windows for text input
• can handle file management

As it turns out, it does all of these things in varying degrees, out-of-the-box. I’ll be posting several blog entries over the coming months, describing some of the ways we’ve found to accomplish our business goals using Sharepoint.

It’s getting announced more extensively next week, but I thought I’d give blog readers a heads-up. The 4th Annual Geocortex User Conference will take place April 26-28, 2009 at the Delta Ocean Point Resort & Spa in Victoria, BC.

I know, I know. It was supposed to move to the fall because we thought it would be better after the ESRI International User Conference in San Diego. However, folks overwhelmingly told us they didn’t want us moving our annual user from our usual April/May timeslot conference to October because there are already so many conferences in the fall. So we listened.

We even managed to get the last weekend that shoulder-season rates are in effect, which makes things less expensive (not to mention the recent and significant drop in the Canadian dollar relative to the US dollar).

Registration opens next week.

It’s been a few months since our last book review, so I thought I’d summarize some recent prose making its way around the office I had the opportunity to curl up with…

“The Breakthrough Company“, by Keith Mcfarland, is business non-fiction, written in a style and approach not unlike “Good to Great” and “Built to Last” (themselves, classic business fodder for entrepeneurs and managers). Keith’s book, in an effort to determine what makes small companies grow into large ones, summarizes several years worth of tireless research into 7 central tenets; common attributes that define these “breakthrough” companies. Certainly not one to ruin a movie’s ending, I’ll leave it to the reader to decide for themselves if these tenets seem plausible.

Overall, I’m a sucker for business case studies, and the book doesn’t dissapoint in this arena. Intuit (TurboTax and Quickbooks) and Polaris (ATVs) are profiled (amongst many others), and it is fascinating to review the “story” behind their success. What I found difficult to accept as part of the book’s premise was the seemingly tight correlation between success and the attributes these companies held – this seemed like classic attribution bias to me. Couple this with the outsized success we would expect a handful of companies to experience during the course of their growth, and all of a sudden analysts are seeing patterns in random events, from which they’re drawing inaccurate conclusions. Overall, I think the tenets presented in the book are valid business advice, but fuel for breakthrough companies alone? No. Timeless food for thought for managers bent on delighting their customers and scaling new heights?