Cool new spatial analysis for SharePoint users

I’ve always been sort of a map nut.  In fact, I love maps (there, I said it! :) ).  Way back when I was Director of Elections for a county out in the State of Washington, I used to spend a lot of time with maps.  In particular, we had a map of the county with transparent layers that folded down showing election precinct lines, school district lines, hospital district lines, and boundaries for all kinds of other districts.  We even had a “Television Reception District” (really). 

Working with the underlying maps and the transparent data sheets wasn’t always easy.  Each transparency held data that was very precisely hand-drawn by a civil engineer (which meant we only had a couple map sets), and it was a challenge to get more than a few people gathered around the map and transparencies at any one time.  Thinking back on this experience – only 15 years ago – it’s amazing how far we’ve come in our ability to make maps and spatial analysis accessible to people.  And I’m happy to see that progress on this front continues!

The most recent advancement – IDV Solutions released Visual Fusion 4.0 today (thanks to Owen Allen for the tip).  This solution integrates with SharePoint and uses Virtual Earth as the “base map” and plots data over the map onto transparent layers created with Silverlight. If you’ve spent much time on this blog, you already know I’m a fan of Silverlight and Virtual Earth, and Visual Fusion shows a great use of these technologies. 

That said, what stands out to me is the SharePoint integration the solution offers.  You can plot data from SharePoint lists – which makes it very easy for users to add their own ad hoc data.  Also, you can plot data accessed via the Business Data Catalog – which makes it easy to add data from corporate data sources.  And, you can even make Visual Fusion’s spatial analysis capability available to your SharePoint users as a web part!   This should go a long way toward making spatial analysis available to a wider audience! 

Here’s a a screenshot from IDV Solutions’ interactive demo that happens to show swine flu cases via an RSS feed.  Click on the pic below for a larger version, or click here to play with demo yourself. 

By the way, Visual Fusion 4.0 is a less common example of what Microsoft means by the term “Software-plus-services”.  Software-plus-Services is about software from the cloud, on servers, and on devices all working together well… most examples tend to focus on either the cloud, or the device (phone, PC, etc) and cloud working together.  In contrast, Visual Fusion shows software working together across server and cloud tiers, as well as composition of multiple services into a solution – a very useful solution profile! 

Technorati Tags: Visual Fusion,IDV Solutions,Spatial Analysis,mapping,SharePoint,Silverlight,Virtual Earth,software-plus-services