Mapping Indoor Spaces

The Gartrell Group recently completed the first phase of a project for Entech Engineering to configure a version of ESRI’s Campus Place Finder to match their needs.
The Place Finder is exactly what it sounds like; “a web application that allows employees and visitors to locate people and places on a campus or in a single building.” We’re mapping indoor spaces!

We configured the Campus Place Finder to meet Entech’s security requirements and other needs that are not fulfilled by the “out of the box” product, such as configuring the app to support web-based editing of room attributes. Our firm’s expertise with ArcGIS Server, network security,  and Javascript/HTML5 made us the ideal choice for this project.  Our capability to host the system on secure, cloud-based infrastructure was also attractive to Entech, as it will reduce their support burdens and get them into production much faster.

The state of the state with regard to indoor mapping and navigation is rapidly gaining sophistication, and some of the capabilities are beginning to mainstream.  If you have questions about how to extend your location intelligence to interior space, or have application development or hosting needs, please contact us.

Cloud-based GIS as a utility

We discuss the benefits of cloud-based GIS here quite a bit. One reason is obvious; it’s one of our products, and we’re in the business of selling products. But we also believe that cloud-based GIS is definitely a game changer.

The obvious

Cloud-based GIS changes the game in that it gets you out of tangling with your IT staff over server hardware, configurations, and permissions settings, or worse yet, trying to administer them yourselves when you’re a GISer and not a systems engineer! It also gives you a level of performance, redundancy, and failover that you’ve always known you should have and never managed to get in place.

The not-so-obvious

You’ve probably already realized the above game-changer issues, but here’s where we rock your world with an accounting paradigm shift. In the past, your server resources have been viewed as capital investments. As your needs have increased, you’ve no doubt had to engage in yearly battles to justify the expense of purchasing newer, bigger and faster servers. Over the past few years, many companies’ overall budgets have been tightened, which makes every department have to fight that much harder to get their piece of the pie.

Cloud-based GIS can save you from these battles, as it can function (and be accounted for) much more like a utility than may have been the case with your old server setup.  You may find benefit in moving our cloud-based GIS services into operations.

Contact us today to discuss your needs! Your accounting department will thank you (after they swallow the medicine…).

GIS Hosting for CB&I

Client:  CB&I
CB&I is a global energy infrastructure company with approximately 50,000 employees, working from more than 30 countries.  Growth in demand for GIS services from globally distributed customer groups presented the CB&I GIS and IT teams with a variety of challenges.  These challenges led them to seek assistance from the Gartrell Group to design, implement, and host specialized GIS infrastructure that would offer internal GIS staff, partners, and end users an improved level of service.

Goal: Establish high-performance production GIS infrastructure to support internal and external customers of this globally distributed, Fortune 500 company. 

Services Provided:The Gartrell Group collaborated with CB&I GIS and IT personnel to design, and then implement a high availability (HA), multi-tiered enterprise GIS platform.  The platform includes both data, and application tiers. It supports distributed/ remote editing teams, synchronization with corporate data systems, and integration of mobile data collection, all while conforming to CB&I’s IT security architecture and policy.

The hosted environment has been in production for over five years. The Gartrell Group has provided ongoing enterprise support services which include 24×7×365 system monitoring, regular systems analysis, engineering support, architectural planning and upgrade support.

Key Technologies:  GIS Hosting, ESRI ArcGIS Server, ArcSDE, Microsoft SQL Server, Mobile GIS

“You guys have been there for us.  This is one partnership that has really worked out.  We are definitely more effective since we made the transition to have you host our GIS systems.“  – Bill Harvey, Technical Manager, Geospatial & Information Management, CB&I.