Geocortex Blog

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.

Well, we’re all back in the office after the ESRI Business Partner Conference and Developer Summit in Palm Springs last week. There has been lots of follow-up and I haven’t had time to recap.

At these events, ESRI announced their new ESRI Partner Network, which will classify ESRI’s business partners into three levels (Silver, Gold, and Platinum). Of about two thousand partners, approximately 10% will be Gold Partners and not more than 1% will be Platinum Partners.

In recent months, we were grateful to be invited to be one of the ten inaugural/guinea pig partners (I think there are five Gold and five Platinum) for the roll-out of the program. We’re now pleased to announce:

Latitude Geographics has been recognized as an inaugural Platinum ESRI Partner.

I’m very proud of this, and of the people with whom I have the honor of working. This recognition reflects the talent of my colleagues here at Latitude, our partners and resellers around the world, and our long-time and visionary customers. The day-to-day hard work of these folks to build and implement our technology ultimately defines who we are. So to all who helped make this possible… thank you.

I’ll pop up another post about the BPC/Dev Summit in the next day or two, but I wanted to share this news.

For the last few months the Geocortex Optimizer team has been working hard on Optimizer version 1.4. One of the new features that we’re excited about is a new interactive heat map reportlet. For those of you new to heat maps, a heat map is a 2 dimensional representation of data where larger values are seen as hot and smaller values are cold. Values are displayed graphically on a map using a hot to cold color scale such as red to blue. Optimizer uses heat maps to show areas that people are looking at based on the number of times a tile is requested for a particular area.  All sorts of planning decisions can be made on the basis of Optimizer’s heat maps such as whether or not to purchase new imagery for a particular area or what tiles to regenerate when edits are made to underlying map data. As an aside, we used ESRI’s Silverlight client side API to implement this feature which was a real joy to work with. 

If you have a copy of Geocortex Essentials, take a look at the release notes for the 2.2.2 maintenance release we packaged up today.  On our Support Center downloads page, you will find the release along with accompanying documentation.

2.2.2 contains some bug fixes, and also includes all of the bug fixes included in the recent 2.2.1 maintenance release.

One of the neat new capabilities of Geocortex Essentials is the ability to integrate oblique imagery generated by Pictometry’s Image Navigator alongside 2-D map data delivered via ArcGIS Server. This can be a powerful tool for planners, emergency responders, assessors, public works and others.

Latitude Geographics has just launched a marketing campaign in conjunction with Pictometry International to develop awareness of this new capability. We recently sent an email inviting customers and prospects to an upcoming live webinar on this topic. The webinar will include the following presenters:

• Darin Herle from Latitude Geographics speaking about Geocortex Essentials
• Scott Sherwood from Pictometry speaking about Pictometry Image Navigator
•  Bill Shaw from Milwaukee County speaking about how they have delivered this integration via ArcGIS Server, complete with a live demonstration of a real world application

We encourage anyone interested to sign up for this webinar to learn more about this capability. You can view the message we sent, and sign up for the webinar, at http://www.geocortex.com/ENews.

If you have any questions or comments about this, please contact Michael Marek at mmarek@latitudegeo.com.

We hope you can attend!

If you’re an ESRI Business Partner attending ESRI’s Business Partner Conference in Palm Springs next month, we’ll be co-presenting with ESRI to share best practices and what we’ve learned working alongside ESRI and ESRI distributors around the world.

Hope to see you there!