So ESRI has a new product arriving:
Another major/joint effort involves the development of a new ESRI product called MapIt. This technology provides simple geocoding and mapping capability for the Microsoft environment. MapIt enables developers to create maps of their enterprise data stored SQL Server 2008 and Excel. MapIt is designed to give non-GIS organizations the ability to easily create maps and share them within a variety of Microsoft environments like SharePoint. Details will be announced in July.
There were rumors of such a product coming out at the DevSummit, but nothing came of it. This appears to be the continuation of the Silverlight/WPF product that ESRI has been working on. What is interesting here is it would appear not to be using ESRI Servers (ArcGIS Server/ArcSDE) and direct connecting to SQL Server then visualizing on Bing Maps. It would appear that you can develop using ESRI’s APIs, but not deal with ArcObjects. As an ESRI developer though, I’m wondering if this could be my new MapObjects?
No word on pricing and licensing, but I’m going to be paying close attention to MapIt in two weeks.
10 Comments
Whoa.
If this really works as it should (abundantly simple-to-implement widgets) and is available at a reasonable cost/price/fee, then this is kinda interesting. Kinda.
all the same, me likey Google for the simple shite.
So…
We’re talking about a nice geocoding/mapping wizard for excel or sql data? If they have someone capable enough to set up their data in sql server, it seems they’re this close to geocoding and just need to pointed to a geocoding service.
It would certainly useful; in my county, we’ve approached GIS expansion in our county as a question of ‘What data do you have addresses/zip codes for?’ Of course, the issue is that you’d still have to notify a bunch of people with no clue of GIS of ESRi’s existence- how well/obvious would it be integrated in Excel/Access? It would be great if MapIt could interface with other map services easily with little user config (us setting up our own MapIt interface to add in the rest of our county’s data).
I think I’ll be underwhelmed by this product. Whelmed at best.
I think the Silverlight Api is the bigger issue and the question is how far ESRI goes down the Microsoft track. Notice that Silverlight MapControl can do about the same kinds of things directly with spatial DBs and OGC services.
It seems to me that this is one more acknowledgement that the middle tier territory is under pressure – spatial db below and client API above. The ESRI layer is getting thinner.
I think you hit it right on the head Randy. I see ESRI moving more into this space over the next year. Could be very disruptive if done correctly.
sounds like a direct competitor to Mapdotnet Studio UX.
We’ll see…the ESRI developers kept coming by our booth years ago when we had ASP.Net controls for ArcIMS development and then voila’, you had the .NET ADF about a year later. So we decided to go Silverlight a year and a half ago, now ESRI has a beta Silverlight control. Then we create a completely .NET WPF renderer that can consume SQL08 spatial directly. And now 9 months later we hear rumors of MapIt. Not to say ESRI is following MapDotNet – it may just be a natural progression. Anyway, we welcome this move because it gives credibility to the path we are on. ESRI is still a leader and many will follow.
And what about competition with Visual Fusion/SharePoint? Just shows again, larger ships are slower to veer in new directions; but, once turned…
Everyone has been screaming a M$ conspiracy ever since ESRI rolled out the personal geodatabase (.mdb). Silverlight is cool, but so was flash. APIs will come and go. What will drive this will be the consumers. I’ll mash up with Bing Maps if it’s quick and easy and not lose any sleep about being a ‘fanboy’. As long as customers are happy.
I find MapIt kind of interesting, because in reality it is two products being bundled and marketed as one. Either you get the user friendly SharePoint webpart which can not be extended at all or you get the Silverlight API which can be fully extended but you build the solution from ground up in silverlight. Marketing material and demos makes it look like you can do anything with “MapIt”, in reality you get two separate front-ends with no commonality and the end-users are locked in by what product line they choose to develop on.
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[...] From a user standpoint, Microsoft seems to favor ESRI’s product (though one could say they were at the ESRI UC so we’ll have to see how Microsoft plays MapIt moving forward). Enterprise customers seem to prefer ESRI, but MapIt isn’t aimed at them (I can’t tell you how many times I heard ESRI say that I didn’t need MapIt because I already had everything I needed; ArcGIS Server). Thus this is a play for the market outside their traditional space and one that is possibly very disruptive if they can pull it off. At the very least, MapDotNet says bring it on! [...]