Time to think about a post-BAO world

Clients, friends, GISers, trivia hounds…
Our Magic 8 Ball tells us that “It is certain” that Esri’s Business Analyst Online (BAO) will be shuttered in late March of 2014. For those of you relying on BAO for portions of your location analytics solution, it’s time to devise an update strategy if you haven’t already.

Much of the popular BAO functionality is now being moved into ArcGIS Online and will be delivered via “geo-enrichment services“.  Verrry nourishing for location intel needs.  This is probably the most obvious alternative, but not the only one.

If this makes you nervous, if you want to discuss the particularities of what this means to you, or if you just want to know what the program is so you can get with it…  drop us a line.

It’s gonna be OK.

Elasticity: A big advantage of putting your GIS in the Cloud

By putting your GIS in our Cloud, you can take advantage of its elasticity. What that means is, you can engage and retire server resources as and when necessary. Short term or occasional needs for geoprocessing, tile cache creation, running massive regressions, etc. can be met by spinning up and using a server resource for a defined period. You get the resource you need when you need it, but don’t pay for an otherwise underutilized resource during periods of low or no demand.
We work with all of our customers to plan for upcoming and potential needs. As a Gartrell Group customer, you’ll be in a good position to quickly add server resources as demand requires. Application servers, database servers, failover web servers, geoprocessing workhorses…they can all be rapidly integrated into your ecosystem of cloud-based resources. This is that “elasticity” of the cloud you’ve heard about. Bring them up, use them when needed, and then put them to bed — optimize your resource utilization so performance is sustained and you’re not paying for what you’re not using.

If you’ve been pondering the benefits of moving your GIS to the Cloud, give us a shout and ponder no more. Our team can get you set up with right-fit resources so you can focus on what you do best!

Yes, we speak SQL

We recently finished a project for the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD) where we migrated old data from a variety of sources into a new, modern SQL database that our team modeled and implemented. In addition, we built a web application that allows DLCD staff (and, coming soon, county staff) to enter, view and edit the data.
For DLCD, this was a mission-critical project to take control over an ever-growing cacophony of data. We were given data that had been stored in Access, FileMaker and even Paradox. Our job was to model a new, modern database based in SQL Server, parse out (and clean up) the old data, and migrate it into the new database.

Our next step was to build a web application that would allow DLCD staff to enter, view and edit data. Something that – before now – only a limited number of people had the ability to do. Our web application offers a modern alternative to paper forms and business rules and logic have been built into the application to enforce quality in the data as it is entered.  While not a revolutionary concept, this practical use of technology represents a major positive change for an agency that has struggled with data management in the past.

The new database/web application was recently launched and is already a hit among the DLCD staff. They will be using it internally for a few months before opening it up to the counties (the data originates at the county-level) for their staff to directly enter data.

As you can imagine, there were a lot of challenges along the way, but we worked with our client and moved past the challenges (did you see the part about the sources of data!?) to build them a tool that we feel will serve them for years to come.