Bing Maps for Enterprise - Public Sector

-=Virtual Jerry

Back in April I blogged on the Neighborhood Stabilization (NSP) site from the Los Angeles County Housing Development that allows residents to search for and identify foreclosure property, and that features Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth).

The application has caught the attention of Government Technology and is discussed in an article on the publication’s web site entitled “Los Angeles Fights Neighborhood Blight With Online Map.”

The article provides good background and detail on the solution and includes some good quotes from Doug Swoger, director of homeownership and preservation for the L.A. Housing Department.

A couple of my favorite passages from the article:

The map went live officially this spring, after only four weeks of development. Microsoft helped with the project.

Swoger said the HUD is considering L.A.'s map for its best practices. He said the map is saving L.A. government a lot of time and effort.

Bing!

-=Virtual Jerry

If you read Earth Imaging Journal, you will notice this month a feature story about Microsoft Virtual Earth (the story was submitted to EIJ prior to the Bing Maps rebranding) at work for Department of Transportation agencies in their efforts to provide better web services and travel information to citizens.

The story, which highlights solutions from KDOT as well as VADOT and includes references to many other DOT agencies using our mapping platform, ran in the printed publication as well as here on the Earth Imaging Journal website.

Be sure to check it out!

-=Virtual Jerry

Blogging on Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth) imagery releases is a little easier for me as of today.

As readers of this blog know, Microsoft adds tens of terabytes of new content, including high-resolution aerial views, to our mapping platform every month and the list is sometimes rather long. I don’t always receive these updates formatted such that it makes immediate sense to the outside world and have had to massage quite a bit before posting. Lately it’s just been easier to let Chris Pendleton do the work (he IS the Technical Evangelist, after all!) and point my readers to his blog. 

That has all changed today because with the the latest imagery updates that we are announcing today you can now view updates using a new ‘Bing Maps World Tour’ application.

Through Silverlight and Windows Azure technology, you can sit back and relax while the World Tour application provides a guided tour of everything that’s new or you can opt to explore for yourself at your own pace, stopping off at any locations as you please. In essence, the application can be thought of as an interactive slideshow that moves from location to location in our 2D view mode and that you can interrupt to take control of along the way.

What I especially like about the application, in this day of social media and networking, is the ability to share the tour from a specific location with your contacts. Also, the application allows you to not only see new releases but past releases as well.

Matthew Quinlan, who is Group Product Manager for our Enterprise Mapping group and has the best accent of any of us, walks you through the application in the below video.

And, as usual, Chris Pendleton provides a blow-by-blow feature write-up his blog now found on the Bing Maps/Commmunity page.

Huh. I just did it again!

-=Virtual Jerry

Microsoft partner, IDV Solutions, today announced that its SharePoint-based geospatial mashup platform, Visual Fusion, is now integrated with Microsoft’s Azure, allowing rapid creation of enterprise “mashups” that integrate data from virtually any data source into an endless number of applications.

If you are not already familiar with Azure, it is an internet-scale, cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. Azure provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. It can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. Azure features an open architecture that gives developers the choice to build web applications, applications running on connected devices, PCs, servers, or hybrid solutions offering the best of online and on-premises. Microsoft also offers cloud applications ready for consumption by customers. Azure lets developers provide their own unique customer offerings by offering the foundational components of compute, storage, and building block services to author and compose applications in the cloud.

Readers of this blog should already be well familiar with IDV’s Visual Fusion that combines with Microsoft Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth), SharePoint and other Microsoft technologies to create a visual mashup platform that allows organizations to merge data from otherwise incompatible sources—enterprise data stores, Web feeds, spreadsheets and more—into rapidly-built, interactive and collaborative applications that provide a single view of that data.

I’m pretty excited about this announcement from IDV because for three years I have been telling public sector customers how the Virtual Earth (now Bing Maps) web services model minimizes costs, given that the imagery is hosted by Microsoft—updates are done for you, removing that burden from your organization. No need for your users and IT staff to install and maintain data sets or even applications. While this has been true, of course organizations still have needed to invest in an environment to host and serve applications leveraging our mapping platform. And depending on whether their user base consisted of 10 or 10,000, this need changes.

But with today’s announcement, developing applications with Visual Fusion that feature Bing Maps just got much easier but more importantly, less costly and less cumbersome. Developers can now build their solutions locally and then push them up to the cloud to make them live and public. Investments in infrastructure, scalability, and maintenance are of less concern to the organization looking to create collaborative mapping applications. 

Nice!

The full announcement from IDV Solutions can be read here. Meanwhile, they have created and posted a demo that integrates content from Data.gov (Microsoft’s Open Government Data Initiative) and Bing Maps in a user-friendly Silverlight interface for all toreview at http://visualfusion.cloudapp.net.

Who’s looking out for your budgets and taxpayer spend? Microsoft and its partners, I’d say.  ;-)

Bing!

-=Virtual Jerry