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I just want to give IDV Solutions a huge shout out today. I dragged myself in to work after waking to another dreary Seattle morning. Hoping the coffee would perk me up…bring out the fail whale. However, this morning I finally got some time to investigate the latest version of IDV’s Visual Fusion (4.0). After just a few clicks, I am re-inspired to take on the mapping world – which is good because I have a web cast here in 30 minutes!

Visual Fusion is an enterprise mashup platform for creating interactive, visual applications utilizing the power of SharePoint. Integrate enterprise information, Web services, and unstructured workgroup files into a single interactive picture, and present them in the context of location, time, or other visualization. Communicate the big picture immediately, and allow users to discover, contribute, collaborate, and act. Test drive Visual Fusion 4.0 as seen above.

Now, what you see above is a fairly robust demonstration of the visualization capabilities provided by Visual Fusion 4.0. The demonstration integrates all kinds of great data such as US County Demographics, US Market Population (Bars and Radius), Population by County, and Public RSS feeds such as Swine Flu cases and National Parks. You can also search Wikipedia and map out information from there. They’ve even integrated some Web Mapping Services (WMS) such as US Weather Radar and NASA Elevation Models.

What else? Geocoding. Weather overlays. Silverlight UX. Road, Aerial, Hybrid map styles. New, proprietary map styles – Low Light and Blue Print. Bathymetry. Simple SharePoint dashboard interface. Now, this is jam-packed with data – a shorter list is what they don’t have; but, where Visual Fusion is most powerful is visualizing YOUR data. This experience will change your perspective on how critical maps have become to visualizing your asset, financial, emergency, etc. etc. information.

I’ll be talking about this in detail during my “Visualizing Data Across the Enterprise with Virtual Earth” web cast which starts here shortly (if you missed it a recording will be made available online later this week). Next week, well do the technical deep dive in “Developers Can Boost Business Across the Enterprise”

Nicely done, IDV Solutions. You’ve made my day.

CP