so what is the difference between mappoint streets&tips and autoroute?

There are pretty similar, but Streets & Trips is for North America and AutoRoute is for Western Europe.

I gather they would have called S&T AutoRoute, but someone had already trademarked the name in the U.S., something like that.

Eric

anyone know a little more technical details about them?

cus i know there is mappoint north america, and mappoint europe. i figure those differer in the actual map content. but the other software, does it integrate with other microsoft products, is there an all-in-one program that they've made that has all the maps?

Streets & Trips and Autoroute are consumer products and very cheap compared to MapPoint. They let you do address lookups and routing as well as find restaurants, but little else. There's no object model or programmatic interface for them so they are of little use in integrating into your own "turnkey" application or for automating procedures.

There's no product with all of the maps, although you might say the MapPoint web service is like this -- except it's not a desktop product.

Note that the 2004 versions do not have all the map data that the 2002 versions did although it is by and large better maps for what's there. If you want "all the map data" you'd want to pick up the 2002 versions as well.

Eric

well, i'm kinda dissapointed by the way microsoft has packages this software. i like using it, but i did notice that when i upgraded from 2002 to 2004 i actually had LESS maps. that was really annoying for me.
i wish they'd integrate it all together already. it pisses me off.

but anyways, thanks for the help