Late last week Microsoft announced as part of MIX10 that spatial data support will be coming to the Microsoft SQL Azure Platform. Microsoft® SQL Azure™ Database is a cloud-based relational database service built on SQL Server® technologies. It provides a highly available, scalable, multi-tenant database service hosted by Microsoft in the cloud. SQL Azure Database helps to ease provisioning and deployment of multiple databases. Developers do not have to install, setup, patch or manage any software. High availability and fault tolerance is built-in and no physical administration is required. This is...

Ben Riga has recorded a great episode of Lesson Learned where he chats with Rex Hansen. In this episode of Lessons Learned I chat with Rex Hansen of ESRI.  Rex works on MapIt; a product for visualizing enterprise data on maps.  This was recently released as a on-premises product that enables developers to work with the tabular and spatial data in SQL Server 2008 and integrate that data with maps on ArcGIS online and Bing Maps. ESRI MapIt was announced at the Microsoft Worldwide Business Partner Conference 2009. This latest product offering from ESRI is a combination of software and online...

For those wanting to get started with ESRI MapIt 1.1, there is now a step-by-step guide available. This guide comes bundled with everything you need including detailed instructions and screenshots. I wrote up post when MapIt was released around installation. You can find this here: http://geo.geek.nz/development/… This guide is meant to help new users become familiar with MapIt by understanding some of the common workflows associated with viewing your business data on a map.  The guide is split into four sections: Importing your business data to SQL Server 2008 Spatially enabling SQL Server...

ESRI MapIt was announced at the Microsoft Worldwide Business Partner Conference 2009 earlier this year. This latest product offering from ESRI is a combination of software and online services that enable you to create simple maps from your enterprise data. I had a full write up on MapIt here: http://geo.geek.nz/esri/… With Microsoft PDC 2009 kicking off today, ESRI MapIt 1.1 was made available for download. Over the last four months, the MapIt product has been refined and optimized, and includes a multitude of enhancements. MapIt 1.1 comes packed with a bundle of new features. These new...

ESRI MapIt was released earlier this year at the Microsoft Worldwide Business Partner Conference 2009. This latest product offering from ESRI is a combination of software and online services that enables you to create simple maps from your enterprise data. Since the release of MapIt, I have been working heavily with our Business Partners and Developers in New Zealand to promote MapIt. We have a number initiatives underway to raise the awareness of MapIt in New Zealand and I will write up a post about these as soon as I can. For those users that haven’t yet been able to try it, I thought I would...

Now that the MapIt blog is up and running we are starting to see some content flowing. In the first series of posts, Rex talks about MapIt and answers a number of questions that have been asked since it’s release. Questions ranging from functionality through to packaging through to price. I get asked a lot of the similar questions so this is a nice series of posts to answer these. So what do you get with MapIt? Well there are four key components that make up MapIt. Spatial Data Assistant Spatial Data Service ArcGIS API for Microsoft Silverlight/WPF WebPart for Microsoft SharePoint Rex has...

  A number of users have been asking this question. To answer this clearly. Here are the limitations: Upon the first use of the Spatial Data Assistant or the Spatial Data Service, both are activated for a 60-day trial period. After 60 days, neither the Spatial Data Assistant or the Spatial Data Service will function. The Spatial Data Assistant only imports 100 records from a shapefile into SQL Server or only geocodes 100 records in a SQL Server table. The Spatial Data Service only returns 100 records for a single query. These limitations are removed when MapIt is fully licensed....

I have been getting a dedicated ESRI MapIt server up and running today and I encountered an interesting problem this afternoon. Basically I needed the Spatial Data Services to point to our Technical Solutions Team main database server. This is great and all and actually very simple to do. You specify a username and password and SDS will connect to the database when requested and you can control which databases the user has access to via Microsoft SQL Server 2008. So what’s the problem? Well like Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, whenever a user logs in the server, regardless of whether they...

ESRI MapIt was announced earlier last week at the Microsoft Worldwide Business Partner Conference 2009. This latest product offering from ESRI is a combination of software and online services that enable you to create simple maps from your enterprise data. I had a full write up on MapIt here: http://geo.geek.nz/esri/… For those users that haven’t been able to try it yet or don’t have a server or the ability to try it, ESRI has prepared a great video seminar which provides you are introduction to MapIt. This seminar provides an overview of MapIt and shows how organizations can use MapIt to...

The latest product offering from ESRI, ESRI MapIt was launched at the Microsoft Worldwide Business Partner Conference 2009 yesterday morning. A soft launch of this was also done at the ESRI International User Conference 2009. In line with this launch, marketing collateral as well as the website for MapIt was made available. This talked about this new product, what it does and what it has to offer. I posted full information on MapIt here: http://geo.geek.nz/esri/… Added to the launch of MapIt was the press release which has gone out. Businesses have an exciting new tool to gain insight into...