Geocortex Blog

A great article by Adena Shutzberg, over at Directions Magazine for folks involved in writing “local GIS” articles. If you ever forsee yourself needing to communicate what your organization is up to with GIS or web mapping for public consumption, definitely give this article a read. Better still, bookmark it or print it (and pop it in your Media folder).

With our virtual user conference coming up in early June, we’re discovering how different the online format is as we get into the nitty-gritty of hosting the event.

Undoubtedly, you just can’t beat face-to-face interaction and the energy of a live group. We know a live conference is better; provided that enough people will actually be there. However, our survey indicated that most would’ve been unable to travel to either Victoria or Seattle this year due to travel restrictions.

After deciding the show must go on, it became apparent an online conference would circumvent the core problem (travel) and is doable technology-wise. So we made the commitment, while making clear it’s a big experiment. I’m confident the content will be better than ever before, but I think we didn’t fully appreciate just how radically different a live in-person event is from a live online event. 

For example, think about time zones. When people fly here from Europe they usually have a day or two to recover from jet-lag, and they fully accept the conference schedule during Pacific Daylight Time. On the other hand, if you haven’t left your time zone, the idea of staying up until 2AM is utterly preposterous. Looking back, perhaps we should’ve scheduled sessions for two hours a day over two weeks. But even then, it’s always a lousy time somewhere in the world.

Our solution to the timezone challenge is to record every session and make the videos available for convenient later viewing by attendees, but those folks still won’t get to participate in live polls and other interactive components. Again, I’m confident we’ll deliver good value and hosting the event will be far better than the alternative (nothing), but my point remains… live vs. online conferences are very different animals.

Stay tuned for a candid self-assessment next month of how things go. And be adventurous… don’t forget to register.

Just a quick little tip I picked up for ArcMap: under the Tools > Options menu, on the General tab, you can uncheck the “Make newly added layers visible by default” box.  This is especially useful when you are adding many layers or large datasets to your map, because you won’t have to wait for them all to draw.

I’m pleased to announce the release of Geocortex Optimizer 1.4. We started working on 1.4 a few months ago and I’m very happy with the results.

Version 1.4 introduces a number of new reportlets that will give valuable insight into how your customers are using tiled map services. For example, we added an interactive heat map reportlet (shown below) that you can navigate to get some real insight into what your customers are actually looking at. We also created a reportlet that shows which tiled map service scale levels your customers are viewing. I bet that if you spend some time navigating these two reportlets, you might be surprised with what you find.

Optimizer 1.4 has a new collector that will help you monitor the availability of ArcGIS Server Geocode services – a great help to those who deploy highly available Geocode services. During the 1.4 release, we also spent some time ensuring compatibility with the soon to be released ArcGIS Server 10.0 and we spent a lot of time speeding up our reporting component which, for certain types of data, could be a little on the slow side. Once Essentials 3 is released, Optimizer 1.4 will also report on user activities within Geocortex Essentials. For example, it will show you which Essentials reports your users are printing, what feature hyperlinks they are following and what searches they are performing.

You can download Geocortex Optimizer 1.4 from the Geocortex Support Center.

Geocortex Essentials 2.3 continues to generate a lot of interest with users and the uptake has been strong. As with any major release, we weren’t surprised to learn that there were a couple of issues which have come to our attention.  At 2.3 we shipped a totally redesigned installer, which provides some huge improvements at upgrade time.  Of course, we thoroughly tested the new installer (for over four weeks actually).  Despite this, a few real world customers inevitably turned up a few bugs and oddities that required love. Sigh. I suppose with installation there’s always going to be some environments and unique scenarios that can’t be predicted… or perhaps we just missed a couple.  

Whatever the case, we packaged up these resolutions (and a couple other bug fixes) into a 2.3.1 maintenance release.  It’s available now, and as always the release notes are available on the Support Center.  Consult the release notes to determine if it makes sense for you to upgrade.

I’m pretty excited about this maintenance release since it’s our first release which will leverage the simplified upgrade capabilities of the previously mentioned installer.  Provided Geocortex Essentials 2.3 is installed, you can seamlessly upgrade (in-place) to 2.3.1.

ESRI’s Web ADF ships with Map Tips.  So what is this new Dynamic Map Tips feature in Geocortex Essentials 2.3 all about?

There’s a subtle, but important difference between Geocortex Essentials Dynamic Map Tips, and the Map Tips provided by ESRI’s Web ADF: as their name suggests Dynamic Map Tips are loaded dynamically, when the user requests them.

(more…)

Today we cut the 2.3 release of Geocortex Essentials.  If you are using or evaluating Geocortex Essentials you will definitely want to take a look at the features in this release. 

We’ve introduced new features that a lot of our customers have been asking for, and the new installer is going to really help with installation, upgrades, site migration and overall management of Essentials deployments. 

The Geocortex Support Center downloads page contains the installer, and related documentation including release notes. 

I highly recommend consulting the release notes to get a complete understanding of what’s included in this release.  In the meantime, here’s a quick list of highlights:

• The new installer
  • Support for future in-place product upgrades (for example, upgrade from 2.3 to 2.3.1, or 2.3 to 2.4)
  • Continued support for side-by-side installation
    • Also allows side-by-side installation of the same version for multiple deployments on one server
  • Site migration features (to migrate sites through environments like dev –> test –> prod, or to support migration from one version of Essentials to the next like 2.1 –> 2.3, or 1.5.2 –> 2.4)
• Dynamic Map Tips
  • Map tips which query features on demand instead of all at once to leverage massive performance improvements over basic Map Tips
• Windows Integrated Single Sign-on for sites using Active Directory security
• New “Delta” project file type
  • Saves only the changes made during a user’s session, so administrative changes to the site and map service are preserved when the project is restored
• New Save/Open project workflow
  • Uses Save & Save As functionality
  • Includes a server-side file browser for locating and storing project files
• New “Compact” report type displays selected information and search results in a compact form in the left side panel
• Interface redesign of the Selection Summary control
• Upload CSV File
• Extract user-created markup to shapefile
  … and many others

As a .NET shop (primarily), we need to stay on top of Microsoft’s software releases, especially when a new version of .NET comes out.  .NET 4 was released on Monday and so we’ve been putting some effort into trying our software on the new platform in order to eliminate any future surprises.

As expected, there were a bunch of little things that cropped up but nothing too major.  Among the issues there was one in particular that was a bit interesting. (more…)

ESRI’s Community Maps Program enables your organization to contribute geographic data to become part of an online community map.  If you are interested in making your data broadly available through ArcGIS Online – particularly high-resolution imagery, detailed street data, and topographic data – then check out the description and fill out a participation form.  Contributions are being added to the World Imagery, World Street, and World Topographic Maps.  See some recent contributions here.

How have five days gone by since my initial post and two weeks since the ESRI BPC/Dev Summit? I think a good way to judge the impact of a conference is not just how busy you were while you were there, but the required extent of follow-up on your return.

Others (such as James Fee) have already done great job of recapping these gatherings. Rather, I’ll offer a few quick thoughts from my perspective, since people ask about how things went for us.

During the BPC plenary, I finally experienced the power of Twitter. I signed up for an account some months ago, and have been sitting on the sidelines as an observer (personally, I really don’t think regular tweeting is for me). It was a remarkable experience to sit in the BPC plenary and follow tweets on my iPod Touch as other people in the audience were sharing their thoughts in real-time on what they were seeing up on stage. It enriched my conference experience.

In addition to our new Platinum Business Partner status, we were also grateful to receive an “ESRI 2010 Worldwide Partner of the Year” award. We were in fact selected from among ESRI Canada partners, though it could be misconstrued we’re the ESRI 2010 Worldwide Partner of the Year rather than a ESRI 2010 Partner of the Year (as in, among the partners located outside the USA).

Darin did a joint presentation with Susann Nilsson of ESRI, which I’m told went well (unfortunately I missed it due to a parallel meeting). Apparently Jack Dangermond quietly slipped in at some point, and at the end got up and spoke for five or ten minutes which included some nice things about our product-based approach to serving customers.

We were a Gold Sponsor, and our spot in the exhibit hall (located between the bar and food) went really well. We primarily previewed what’s coming as part of Geocortex Essentials 3.0 (think REST), and people really seemed to get what we’re doing. For those keen on our take on where we’re at relative to ESRI, we’ve never felt in a better position for where things are going. I’ll talk a lot more about all this at my next Geocortex Solutions for ArcGIS Server: Current Status and the Road Ahead webinar for customers, so be sure to sign up.