Enterprise Ready

In case you missed them, here are some recent articles about IDV and our product, Visual Fusion:

Building Geo-Enabled Mashups in Minutes [GIS Cafe]

“A new version of Visual Fusion, Visual Fusion 4.0, was released in May by IDV Solutions. The visual mashup software offers integration between Microsoft Office, SharePoint, and geospatial mashup technology. How this integration works is that Visual Fusion extends features of SharePoint-lists, libraries, templates and Web parts-to automate geo-tagging and provide an interactive, visual user interface, according to Scott Caulk, product manager at IDV Solutions. Users can work with familiar tools such as Microsoft Office and create geo-enabled Word and PowerPoint documents, Excel spreadsheets and SharePoint Lists and Libraries and integrate these seamlessly into map applications and other mashups.” – Susan Smith, GIS Cafe

Visual Fusion 4.0: Getting the Enterprise Excited about Visualization [Directions Magazine]

“So, what is Visual Fusion? I'd describe it as a solution for integrating geodata and services (especially those of SharePoint) into map-focused applications. IDV doesn't use the term GIS in describing the solution. Instead, if pressed, CTO Ian Clemens describes IDV Solutions as a "mashup company." With clients like NGA, Toyota, the United Nations and NYPD, that seems a bit too informal, though it is technically accurate.” – Adena Schutzberg, Directions Magazine

I’m catching up on a few significant news releases we’ve had here at IDV in the last couple of weeks. Last week we announced:

IDV Solutions Launches Visual Fusion in the Cloud: Integrates with Azure, OGDI & Data.gov

Visual Fusion, our SharePoint-based geospatial mashup platform, is now integrated with the cloud on Microsoft’s Azure. As an example of the powerful visual mashup capabilities of Visual Fusion, we developed a demonstration application that integrates content from the Open Government Initiative’s Data.gov, Microsoft’s Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI), and Bing Maps in our user-friendly Silverlight interface.

Enabling Visual Fusion’s visual mashup and dashboarding capabilities in the cloud is an exciting milestone for us. The implications for organizations to rapidly create enterprise mashups that integrate data from virtually any data source into an endless number of applications are staggering. Doing this in a powerful cloud platform like Azure creates little to no strain on our customers’ internal systems and resources, and takes the value of Visual Fusion to a whole new level.

See the demonstration live at http://visualfusion.cloudapp.net

Visual Fusion from IDV Solutions combines with Bing Maps, SharePoint and other Microsoft technologies to create a visual mashup platform, empowering organizations to unite 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 the data.

Join the Microsoft Bing Maps team, IDV Solutions and Directions Media for a complimentary webinar that discusses how the Bing Maps and Visual Fusion technologies can help you plan, predict and respond quickly, plus efficiently manage and analyze the overwhelming amount of data that flow through your agencies and departments on a daily basis.

Featuring:
Louis Effa, Director of Information Technology for the Maritime Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation, will present a case study demonstrating how these technologies from Microsoft and IDV Solutions are helping the Maritime Administration to fuse data together to create models and simulations for capacity planning, economic impact analysis, on-demand forecasting and plans for mitigating and reacting to emergency situations.

This webinar will highlight how:

· Visual Fusion empowers everyone in an organization to create interactive, geospatial mashups from unlimited sources of data.

· Visual Fusion provides a streamlined platform for building killer apps that drive agility, collaboration and insight.

· Bing Maps brings clarity to business intelligence data and augments situational awareness.

· Bing Maps integrates with other Microsoft technologies to provide the visualization for collaborative, geospatial data applications.

"Putting dots on a map and simple mashups are no longer enough. Businesses and organizations need true location intelligence... a comprehensive, integrated solution that presents an interactive picture to give decisions-makers a 360 degree view of their operations. IDV Solutions and Microsoft have a solution geospatial professionals, and those looking to utilize geospatial, need to see."

Joe Francica
Vice Publisher and Editor in Chief, Directions Media

Today we're pleased to announce Visual Fusion’s extensive integration with Microsoft Office.

Read the press release [IDV Solutions].

In the newest release of VF, users are empowered more than ever to create enterprise mashup feeds using Office products, and, conversely, to pull data from their mashups into Office. We’ve integrated Visual Fusion with the ever-ubiquitous Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, InfoPath, Excel, and, of course, SharePoint Portal.

For example, take the scenario of an emergency operations center (EOC) coordinator, in the threat of a hurricane, looking to grab data on employee residence locations. She could quickly zoom to the Orlando, FL area:

and then create a quick spatial radius query:

and Voila! Visual Fusion generates the appropriate Excel spreadsheet output.

Conversely, the EOC coordinator could upload Excel spreadsheet data into a Visual Fusion-enabled SharePoint document library and have that data visualized as a feed in Visual Fusion. Here are Suspected FL swine flu cases (fictitious) driven directly from a live Excel spreadsheet:

As the Excel spreadsheet is updated, so is the Virtual Earth map—very cool!

For a live demonstration or more information, please Contact Us.

We’re excited to announce a new system integration partner, Geomatic Technologies, out of Australia. Yes, Australia! Interest in Visual Fusion has grown considerably over the last 18 months in the geospatial-savvy market of Australia. Geomatic Technologies has been successfully serving this market and now will be offering powerful geospatial enterprise mashup solutions built on IDV’s Visual Fusion software.

With the recent natural disasters that hit Australia, Victoria (bushfires) and Queensland (flooding), timely response, recovery, and rehabilitation is top of mind. Geomatic Technologies, armed with Visual Fusion, is helping to drive agile response by providing accurate data and technology to deliver critical information in a timely and useful manner.

See the joint Press Release [Directions Magazine]

If you’re interested in connecting with an IDV partner in your area or want more information on Visual Fusion, please Contact Us.