Had the pleasure of attending the Microsoft hosted CIO Summit at the Microsoft conference center in Redmond, WA last week. The annual summit hosts 400+ government and education leaders from across the country who come together to learn from Microsoft and its partners about technology trends that are solving business problems in their sector. One such technology is Bing Maps for visualization of location relevant data. (If you have been reading this blog long enough, you probably knew I would say that next!)
The Bing Maps public sector team showed up at this event prepared to showcase some great applications for state and local government , including a new application from Microsoft partner, IS Consulting. Miami 311 is a public facing, open government transparency application where the citizens of Miami can monitor and analyze non-emergency event information happening in their area. Citizens can report non-emergency requests, like pothole repair or missed trash pickup by dialing 3-1-1 on their telephone. They can then log on Miami 311 to monitor the progress of their request. Miami 311 also serves as a dashboard for City Commissioners to see and monitor citizen requests in their district. The system integrates with the larger Miami-Dade Motorola CSR system and will soon be extended to take service request input from citizens.
The application leverages Bing Maps, ISC's MapDotNet UX Studio and Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform to publish their spatial data to the “cloud” and to build the map configuration file. Remember that Bing Maps applications built on the Azure platform equal minimal IT infrastructure for your mapping applicatins. Development and hosting is the cloud ... the data is served over the cloud. Your users need only an Internet-enabled PC with a browser. Download? If the application is using Silverlight, as this one is (and it looks really slick!), then the Silverlight control (think "plug-in"). That simple.
Give it a look. It is chock full of data, as you can see from the screenshot below, and is really very cool. So cool, in fact, that it won first place in the Microsoft Windows Azure Development contest and was announced at the CIO Summit. I thought I might cry! ;-)
Congrats to our friends at ISC on a job well done and for winning the contest.
-= Virtual Jerry
This was a great post. Regarding how to move an premise GIS app to Windows Azure,
I am trying to undestand how to deploy a bing maps-based app that uses the ArcGIS Silverlight control (URL: help.arcgis.com/.../index.html) with ArcGIS Server/MS SQL Server.
Can MapDotNet UX Studio upload our ArcSDE database to SQL Azure? How much does a licence cost?Is MapDotNet similar to MapIt?
3) Our on-premise app uses ESRI ArcObjects in order to compute some raster files dynamically and update the SQL DB. Is there any way to use ESRI ArcObjects in MS Azure?
Thanks for the comment. For more detailed information on leveraging MapDotNet for Bing Maps/Azure apps, please contact our friends at ISC. www.mapdotnet.com.