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It’s getting announced more extensively next week, but I thought I’d give blog readers a heads-up. The 4th Annual Geocortex User Conference will take place April 26-28, 2009 at the Delta Ocean Point Resort & Spa in Victoria, BC.
I know, I know. It was supposed to move to the fall because we thought it would be better after the ESRI International User Conference in San Diego. However, folks overwhelmingly told us they didn’t want us moving our annual user from our usual April/May timeslot conference to October because there are already so many conferences in the fall. So we listened.
We even managed to get the last weekend that shoulder-season rates are in effect, which makes things less expensive (not to mention the recent and significant drop in the Canadian dollar relative to the US dollar).
Registration opens next week.
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This afternoon, we cut the final release of Geocortex Essentials 1.5. Thanks to those who participated in the Beta program and provided feedback. We released the 1.5 Beta on the same day (coincidentally) as ESRI’s 9.3 SP1 release. Since then, we have ensured compatibility with 9.3 SP1 within Geocortex Essentials 1.5.
1.5 represents a few months of work, and packs with it a good number of new features and bug fixes. To name a few:
… and many more.
Have a look at the Release Notes on the Geocortex Support Center for more details.
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It's been a few months since our last book review, so I thought I'd summarize some recent prose making its way around the office I had the opportunity to curl up with...
"The Breakthrough Company", by Keith Mcfarland, is business non-fiction, written in a style and approach not unlike "Good to Great" and "Built to Last" (themselves, classic business fodder for entrepeneurs and managers). Keith's book, in an effort to determine what makes small companies grow into large ones, summarizes several years worth of tireless research into 7 central tenets; common attributes that define these "breakthrough" companies. Certainly not one to ruin a movie's ending, I'll leave it to the reader to decide for themselves if these tenets seem plausible.
Overall, I'm a sucker for business case studies, and the book doesn't dissapoint in this arena. Intuit (TurboTax and Quickbooks) and Polaris (ATVs) are profiled (amongst many others), and it is fascinating to review the "story" behind their success. What I found difficult to accept as part of the book's premise was the seemingly tight correlation between success and the attributes these companies held - this seemed like classic attribution bias to me. Couple this with the outsized success we would expect a handful of companies to experience during the course of their growth, and all of a sudden analysts are seeing patterns in random events, from which they're drawing inaccurate conclusions. Overall, I think the tenets presented in the book are valid business advice, but fuel for breakthrough companies alone? No. Timeless food for thought for managers bent on delighting their customers and scaling new heights? Yes.
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Last week we attended and exhibited at the ESRI EMEA Conference in London (organized by ESRI UK). The weather was great, everything went smoothly, and I even found some time to catch a few presentations. For the Wednesday night party attendees had the run of the impressive Science Museum, which proved to be a memorable event. I found that the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre had an unexpectedly fragmented feel (everything was spread over several floors), though I think ESRI UK did the best they could with the venue. The location made up for this; right by the Houses of Parliament and across the street from Westminster Abbey.
The teams had both the Geocortex Optimizer 1.0 Beta and the Geocortex Essentials 1.5 Beta 1 (Beta 2 is out today) ready for the conference, and Steve Maddison and I got to be the first to kick the tires while previewing these new versions for business partners and attendees.
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As GIS geeks, we love "cool stuff" in a map. Sometimes we love it too much, wanting to throw in features that contribute little to overall usability. I don't know how many of you saw it, but there was a fantastic parody of form-over-function in GIS from none other than the folks at Saturday Night Live (starting at about 2 minutes in).
And of course, my immediate reaction as a GIS geek was "wow, that's a cool map".
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Laramie, WY October 22-24, 2008
For the last six years, Latitude Geographics has attended every Southwest Users Group (SWUG) conference. From Jackson Hole in 2003 through to Laramie in 2008, the SWUG conference brings together GIS users from Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. This year’s high plains geospatial roundup offered up blowing snow and chilly temperatures – a big departure for a guy like me accustomed to Victoria’s moderate climate. But the warmth of the SWUG organizers (kudos to the entire organizing committee for an awesome job!) allowed the attendees to quickly forget about the cold temperatures, and settle into a dose (actually, many, many doses) of Wyoming hospitality! 
The SWUG event is not your regular, regional GIS conference. John Calkins, ESRI’s “Corporate Technical Evangelist” kicked things off with an interactive keynote session that engaged the group in a geographic approach to problem solving. Plenty of great user and vendor presentations followed, topped off with an evening keynote by Wyoming historian Bruce Blevins. Aside from all the interesting work-related stuff, I’d have to say that the highlight of the conference was the BBQ, Bluegrass, and Broncs event (disclosure: we were also a sponsor). This was not my first rodeo - but it was undoubtedly one of the most unique I’ve seen. The University of Wyoming Rodeo Team put on a presentation just for us, and we got to enjoy steer wrestling, calf roping, barrel racing and bull-riding. Yee-Haw! Later in the evening, we two-stepped to music served up by the Zarks, a local country-western band. I reckon the user sessions were a little subdued the next morning, but attendees (AKA SWUG-uhs) seemed to be wearing a collective grin.
It’s events like these that make me appreciate the industry we work in, given its great mix of knowledge sharing, professionalism, and appreciation for local cultural activities!
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We've been really busy getting Optimizer ready for its first beta release. All things considered, the final few weeks of development went pretty smoothly. We managed to release the Beta in time for the EMEA user conference with a pretty good collection of features and there were not many surprises. For those not familiar with Optimizer, it is an application that assists with the management of ArcGIS installations and related infrastructure. A key component of Optimizer is its reports. Most of Optimizer's reports display at least one chart to help visualize the data Optimizer collects. Below is an example of one of those charts.
We use line, pie and bar charts and a few combinations of bar and line charts - nothing out of the ordinary. What was surprising was the amount of time I had to spend looking for an easy to use, reliable, aesthetically pleasing chart control. There just did not seem to be very many good quality candidates. A few products I evaluated looked promising until I saw their licensing terms. Many products required royalty payments for every Optimizer license we sold. I was surprised because we're talking about a chart control, not some complicated piece of intellectual property that implements a proprietary algorithm. Other candidates were full-featured and buggy or reliable and stylistically awful. In the end, I settled on XtraCharts by DevExpress. XtraCharts are easy to use, reasonably priced ($295 including source code), look awesome and are royalty free. If you need to display charts in an ASP.NET web page or WinForms application, check out DevExpress. You will be glad you did.