MapPoint 2010 Released

MapPoint 2010 is now available for purchase and trial. For those of you who don’t know, MapPoint 2010 gives you more power to visualize business data, communicate insights with instant impact, and integrate maps into the work you do in Microsoft Office. New features include map settings to choose display details, expanded pushpins, and the ability to send routes to your GPS device.* This release is fairly significant, so as I normally do, I figured it would be wise to step through some of the new features for you.

• Customized Map Settings - Choose whether cities, highways, local roads and parks show on your map.  Create maps using custom Map Settings to display your data with selected details. Easily hide roads, geographic boundaries and labels for clear routes and directions. You can now control the look and feel of the native map data. You can turn on and off either the labels and/or the symbols for each of 4 categories with several sub-categories:
  • Populated Places – Major City (1,000,000+ people), City (500,000 – 999,999), Minor City (100,000 – 499,999) and Town/Other Place (0-99,999)
  • Boundaries – Country, State or Province, County, Postal Code and 3-digit Postal Code
  • Transportation – Highways, Local Roads, Toll Roads and Railroads
  • Miscellaneous – Water Features, Parks and Reserves, Points of Interest and All Other

You can do this for each of the 6 map styles (Road, Road and Data, Data, Terrain, Political and Night). You can also chance the fonts on the map to better support your needs for reading the map data…and to help those farsighted folks.

• More Pushpins - Get all of the pushpin images from previous MapPoint versions—over 300 included.
• Refreshed Data - Use updated geographic data in MapPoint to display trends and illustrate key points on maps.
• Navigation and Sharing - Create routes, share with others and send them to your navigation device. This requires a subscription to MSN Direct to send over the FM airwaves.
• The Road Warrior’s Copilot - Plan your trip on your PC and then print, or send your route to your GPS device. This requires a subscription to MSN Direct to send over the FM airwaves.
• Easy to Reroute - Drag-and-drop your route to go around a road or area.
• Show in Bing™ Maps - Quickly find listings when online and add them to a route. Use descriptive words such as “coffee” and “restaurant” to find points near your location. Bing!
• Manage Pushpins - Hide a group of pushpins without deleting. Also, show all pushpin clouds (info boxes) or hide them all at once. Finally!

• Export to GPX - Bundle trip route, pushpin and other information into a single file (.GPX) for easy exporting and sharing. Import data into MapPoint using a .gpx file.

A couple things to note:

1. The new MapPoint Add-in for SQL Server 2008 works with MapPoint 2010, so download that if you want your geometry and geography types in SQL Server 2008 to render in MapPoint 2010.
2. The OLAP and Spatial Data Import COM Add-Ins work with MapPoint 2010, so download those if you need them.
3. There are multiple versions of MapPoint - Microsoft MapPoint North America 2010, Microsoft MapPoint North America with GPS Locator, Microsoft MapPoint Europe, MapPoint Fleet Edition – so make sure you get the right version.
4. Streets & Trips 2010 is also now available, so check out the web site for more details. S&T 2010 also has a free trial, so you can play before you pay.
5. If you don’t trust my clearly skewed Microsoft view of MapPoint 2010 read the following article from MP2KMag.com: http://www.mp2kmag.com/a158--mapfeatures.mappoint.html

Kudos to the MapPoint team for continuing to plug away at this hugely useful and cost effective product. At the very least, you should download the free trail and try it out. Then, use Bing Cashback to find a copy and get some cash put back on your credit card for using Bing to find your purchase.

CP