We can think of no better way for organizations to maximize their investment in Geocortex software than our annual user conference.

With over 20 hours of online presentations available, experts and users share tips, pragmatic experience and best practices that help people get real work done. The conference sessions are recorded, such that this exclusive content can be viewed by registrants at their leisure later on.

We have a fantastic Conference Agenda lined up. Check it out. Register by May 15^th to take advantage of our special early registration rate.

Customers can consult the release notes, and download installers and supporting documentation from the Geocortex Support Center. Highlights of this release include:

• Runtime modifications to Forms. The Display Form activity now contains a new child sequence activity that provides access to the Form’s object model, permitting runtime modifications to the form. This enables end users to be presented with different value options based on previous inputs (e.g. if user specifies their location is in “Canada”, they could be offered “Province” values rather than “State” values)
• New Workflow activities (14 new and updated)
• Compatibly with Esri ArcGIS Server 10.1 pre-release
• Installer improvements
• Bug fixes

Please contact your Latitude Geographics account representative or local reseller if you have any questions!

For example, over the past two years, our Business Development Manager for Energy, Rob Lenarcic, has steadily built up a strong base of customers in the petroleum sector. We have seen outstanding results as we work more closely with our petroleum industry customers in addressing their web-GIS challenges such as adoption of the PODS geodatabase model.

Public Safety is another sector which continues to be very dynamic and where Geocortex is uniquely positioned to address specific GIS challenges. A recent example: through our partnership with NorthSouth GIS LLC, the Port of Los Angeles now uses Geocortex to address their security requirements (which you can learn more about here).

So we’ve clearly seen that successful business area growth requires expert domain knowledge. To this end, we are very pleased to welcome Francis Graf as our new Business Development Manager for Public Safety. Prior to joining us, Francis was the founder and CEO of FDR Forensic Data Recovery Inc. (FDR). Under his leadership, the company grew to being the one of the leading digital forensics professional services companies in Canada. During this time, Francis worked closely with law enforcement agencies, corporations, government and law firms across Canada, the United States, Indonesia, the UK and Saudi Arabia. Francis is also a former police officer and since founding FDR he has been involved in a wide range of highly sensitive civil and criminal investigations. We are looking forward to introducing Francis to our customers so that we can provide even more value to meet their Public Safety needs.

The industry knowledge and experience that both Rob and Francis bring to Latitude and its customers is very valuable. Over the coming year, you will see further news as we work closely with our customers in other sectors and help them solve real world GIS problems with innovative solutions using Geocortex. Stay tuned.

It’s clear Esri users are excited about exploring how to leverage HTML5 and ArcGIS Server.  Because it’s still relatively early in the evolution of the HTML5 standard, we’ve been careful to take an approach that strikes the right balance between delivering powerful functionality today and not overextending what browsers can currently support.

The Geocortex Viewer for HTML5 serves different use cases than our feature-rich web mapping/GIS viewers based on Silverlight and Flex. While its capabilities will grow over time, for the foreseeable future the Geocortex Viewer for HTML5 will serve as a complementary viewer geared towards providing simple, targeted web-mapping applications serving desktop browsers, tablets, and a broad array of mobile devices. It allows you to deliver applications across platforms and devices without having to worry about plugins or building native applications, which is especially applicable to mobile scenarios.

The core framework of the Geocortex Viewer for HTML5 is architected after the Geocortex Viewer for Silverlight (named commands and events, shells, regions, and views, and configuration), and prior Workflows you’ve created should just work.

The Geocortex Viewer for HTML5 has already undergone a number of iterations as part of professional services implementations that started back in October, but version 1.0 is still largely an infrastructure release geared towards workflow-driven mobile apps. Nevertheless, the foundation is all there and we have an aggressive R&D scheduled for the remainder of 2012.

To get started now, Geocortex Essentials customers can download the Geocortex Viewer for HTML5 from the Geocortex Support Center. In addition to documentation and sample code, we’ve also developed a half-day training course; the first is scheduled for May 2^nd.

The online Geocortex User Conference (June 6-7) will also offer sessions on HTML5 strategy and development.

Remember, though HTML5 today delivers when applied in the right ways, it remains an emerging standard. If you want to learn more about HTML5 and Esri technology, including when it might make sense for your organization to get started, be sure to visit www.geocortex.com/html5.

Spring training is almost over for baseball this year, and likewise, for Geocortex. We usually take a breather over the summer months from our busy training schedule and restart in the Fall.

New staff? Changing roles? Big project about to start? If you have been contemplating getting up-to-speed on Geocortex, we have online training taking place this month and in May. Visit our Geocortex website to learn more and to register.

Customers can consult the release notes, and download installers and supporting documentation from the Geocortex Support Center; we’ve also created a series of short videos for our customers describing new features in further detail.

Highlights of these releases include:

Geocortex Essentials 3.8

• Search related data (searchable datalinks). This allows administrators to configure searches against external (non-spatial) database tables, and associate the results with spatial features
• Support for ArcGIS Server Tables and Relationships
• 18 new workflow activities, including feature editing, linear referencing, collections and dictionary utilities, and datatable conversion activities
• Interval refresh for map services: allowing automatic refresh of data if changes to the data source are frequent
• Feature Highlight color configuration: set different colors for different layers
• Support for Geocortex Viewer for Silverlight 1.5

Geocortex Viewer for Silverlight 1.5

• Support for new Geocortex Essentials 3.8 features, including searchable datalinks, ArcGIS Server Tables and Relationships, and new workflow activites
• A new help and tutorial framework: designed for end-users to learn GIS concepts and work effectively with the user interface. This also provides a framework for application designers to “plug-in” custom help content
• Support for ArcGIS Server Feature Attachments. If your data has feature attachments (such as .XLSX, .DOCX or .PDF files), you can now access them through the Viewer

Please contact your Latitude Geographics account representative or local reseller if you have any questions.

A drum roll please….

After reviewing five months’ of forum contributions and feedback, the Geocortex Support Team is ready to announce the winners!

Congratulations to Brad Fisher, our MVP and winner of the $1000 prize. Brad’s work with Critigen on the Thames Tunnel  enterprise GIS, built on ArcGIS Server and Geocortex, provides effective tools to analyse, visualize and access information. Brad cites Geocortex’s ability to rapidly deploy feature-rich, secure map browsers as central to this important project’s success. Brad has been consistently active on the Forums for the  duration of this contest, and has been a great community contributor.

Kudos also to Mike Hargreaves, another significant and helpful contributor to the Forums, who has been selected for the $500 prize. Mike is responsible  for the delivery of both WebADF and Geocortex Viewer for Silverlight interactive maps for both internal and public-facing audiences in the City of Santa Rosa.

A big “Thanks!” to both of you.

Brad Fisher (MVP) - GIS Technical Lead - Critigen - London UK

Mike Hargreaves (MVP Runner-Up) - GIS Coordinator - City of Santa Rosa, USA

Although Brad and Mike are being specifically acknowledged, the Latitude Geographics Team salutes all contributors to the Geocortex Discussion Forums. We’re thrilled to see this community thrive, grow, and help each other succeed with Geocortex software.

We’re readying the next Support Center contributor contest…

Stay posted. We’re really pleased with what the community has provided to date, and want to encourage contributions to the new Geocortex Code Gallery. Another iteration of our contest will run again soon.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of the Geocortex Code Gallery. The Geocortex Code Gallery is an area of the Geocortex Support Center where the community can share code snippets, sample applications, workflows and other user-generated content.

The Geocortex support team has included a small nucleus of content to kick-start the gallery, but the expectation is that most content will come from Geocortex customers, implementers, and business partners.

The Geocortex Code Gallery is as a place where you can show off your work and view real-world solutions developed by other community members. We encourage everyone to submit reusable code, discuss the existing samples, and work together to improve the quality of this resource. If you find something in the code gallery that you can improve upon, or add functionality to, please submit your contribution while acknowledging the original author.

Last week we silently enabled the code gallery with a “beta” tag. We will consider it to be in “beta” for the time being as we may make changes or adjustments as we monitor its adoption by the community. Our hope is that it will quickly become an integral part of our Support Center and a valuable resource.

Please think about what you may want to contribute, and give us any feedback that you have!

-Alex McKeachie
Geocortex Support Manager

Customers can consult the release notes, review a 35-minute video describing new features in further detail, and download the installers in our Geocortex Support Center.

Highlights include:

Geocortex Essentials 3.7

• Workflow and Forms
  Significant additions/enhancements to  including usability enhancements, rich contextual help for activities, 12 new activities, and new form input types.
  
• Layer Themes
  Configure sets of related layers into “themes” which can be easily toggled by end users.
• Support for simple HTML markup in feature descriptions
  Now, feature information can be formatted with images and hyperlinks when displayed in map tips or the results list view.
• Bug fixes

Geocortex Viewer for Silverlight 1.4

• Usability enhancements
• Layer theme support
• Support for New HTML tags
  in feature descriptions for enhanced display of features in map tips and results list view.
• Support for new Workflow activities and Form items
• Support for ArcGIS API for Silverlight 2.4
• Bug fixes

Please contact your Latitude Geographics account representative or local reseller if you have any questions.