One of the main tenants of Visual Fusion is to geo-enable SharePoint so that business users can create and manage their own spatial data from within their friendly and familiar lists and libraries. Allowing for the creation of a geographic component in an intuitive and accessible portal is an empowering feature, and one that gives a break to GIS specialists who would previously be tapped to generate the stuff by proxy (or, more likely, not -and a sans-spatial SharePoint dataset would persist).
In previous versions of the product, users could use Visual Fusion's visual geocoder to pin a geographic coordinate to their list or library item and, therefore, be able to work with it on a map.
But often a pin is not enough, because the phenomena we are interested in representing is more complex than that.
Breathe geography into your enterprise portal. Now this is a GIS for everyone!
Visual Fusion 5.0 (available Fall, 2010) extends the visual geocoder to include a rich set of map drawing tools. Now, if your data item is more like a set of building footprints for a campus, series of business territories, airport perimeters, a network of shipping lanes, a flight-plan, or anything where a dot just won't do, then you are in business!
Also, since these draw tools are in SharePoint, you can still take advantage of all the trusty ActiveDirectory, collaboration, and change tracking features. What's more, you'll be able to work with this data in the context of live web feeds, enterprise databases, and your existing GIS infrastructure.
So, starting this fall, put down that phone and start drawing up this data yourself! And get ready to live richly, my friend.
Wow. That is really awesome. I didn't expect the data creation to take place in the list.
ReplyDeleteIs the data creation also available through the main Maps webpart interface?
Yes! Great segue!
ReplyDelete