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While I was writing about Microsoft partner IDV Solutions in my last post, I meant to share a link to the company's announcement about the release of their Visual Fusion Server 3.0.* This latest release of their geospatial application development platform enables applications that not only leverage key Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) functionality such as Excel Services, Enterprise Search, the Business Data Catalog, and security, but also geospatially enables MOSS Libraries and Lists, combining this information with existing enterprise data stores, such as SQL Server and ArcSDE. And of course the real beauty is that Visual Fusion Server allows customers to integrate all this data on top of a Virtual Earth map so that the data can be easily visualized and more readily understood.

IDV has also paid me the favor of posting a write-up on creating 3D models using the 3DVIA Modeler application software available through Microsoft's Virtual Earth powered Live Search Maps site. This tool is available free to consumers and businesses and allows you to build your own 3D models to include in your Virtual Earth applications or to share with other Live Search Maps users through Virtual Earth Collections. This is a perfectly complimentary offering for users of the Virtual Earth 3D environment. It allows you to take full advantage of our precise Virtual Earth city models created by Microsoft for applications that demand sub-meter accuracy, while also allowing you to create your own models for buildings not currently modeled in Virtual Earth and not requiring the accuracy benefits of the Microsoft engineering process. Remember that you can also get precise Microsoft geo-specific, photo-realistic and accurate models for your region or critical infrastructure through Microsoft subsidiary Vexcel Corporation and its Custom Collections service.

The IDV write-up can be found here. Meanwhile, fellow Microsoft blogger Steve Lombardi also recently posted an informative write-up on the 3DVIA Modeler application that can be found here and Microsoft has a full tutorial you can follow here.

Happy modeling!

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