MapForums

Whenever I have the opportunity to bend the ear of public sector customers about the benefits of the Virtual Earth mapping platform over the competitor's offering, there are a few key points that I like to emphasize after talking about the great imagery, the accurate geocoding, and the web service model (with the option of the Virtual Earth Appliance for offline applications).

Those points are: Microsoft has a longstanding history of providing enterprise solutions; Microsoft has a vast developer community and a strong partner network, experienced in developing on Microsoft platforms and using Microsoft APIs; and being a Microsoft product, Virtual Earth integrates easily with other Microsoft products that public sector customers already have invested in, such as SQL, Office, and in particular, Sharepoint.

To underscore the latter of these two points, Ian Clemens--of Microsoft partner IDV Solutions--has blogged on a capability of their Visual Fusion Server to quickly plot Excel data onto a Virtual Earth map. Because the data is passed from Excel to Sharepoint, you can set update alerts on the contents, set document workflows, assign permissions, and search the content within the SharePoint environment. As a 'nicety' (a rather cool one, I might add), Visual Fusion Server allows you to assign symbology from a built-in library to differentiate and identify the data types you are layering on the Virtual Earth map.

Best of all ... because the data is coming from a Sharepoint portal, your Excel spreadsheet just went from a static tabular list to a dynamic linked source for your Virtual Earth map data.

I think I am going to cry.*

Ian's blog entry takes you through the process step-by-step. A great read.

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