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Geocortex Partner Summit

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On Friday 13th September, around lunchtime, I was sitting outside on the deck of the Spinnakers pub with our Partner Manager, Vince Wruck, and Partners Solution Architect, Colin Doak, watching the fog roll in and the sea planes desperately trying to take off before they became fog bound. I was, of course, at the Geocortex Partner Summit 2019, held in Victoria in Canada.

It was the end of the conference and I was trying to assimilate all the knowledge that I had been exposed to, in order to pass it on to the 1Spatial Geocortex Community - and what a lot there is!

Prior to the actual partner conference some of us techy types from 1Spatial took part in our regular ‘Hackathon’ exercise. Initially, Patrick Fingler – Geocortex Technology Specialist - gave us a morning’s training on Geocortex Workflow and Geocortex Mobile. During the afternoon session we split into three teams of mixed ability and were given the task of expanding a works notification workflow into something of our own design. Team 1 came up with a way to take a photo of the information on a fire hydrant and automatically recognise the characters in order to fill out the works request form. Team 2 worked out a way to move from job to job by calculating the distance to the next available job from the device’s current location.  Finally, Team 3 developed an approach of polling the device’s position system until an acceptable level of accuracy had been reached, thus giving the result better accuracy.  At the end of the day the results were judged, and prizes were given to the best solution.  Unfortunately, I was not part of the winning team, but it was a great fun exercise to take part in.

In no order, these are the highlights that I would like to share:

  • Jon Brooks – CEO for the Geocortex business opened up by giving us a company briefing. In this briefing he explained the company structure pertinent to Geocortex, that being:
  • Richard Wiegmann – CEO, VertiGIS (the parent company for Geocortex);
  • Jon Brooks – CEO, for the North American arm of VertiGIS, which currently only includes the Geocortex business; and Kees van Loo - Executive Director and responsible for sales. Over the 2 days we all got to know Kees very well.
  • Jon explained that the company’s growth was excellent and that they had built even closer ties with Esri to the point where Esri’s Transportation team were now demonstrating their linear referencing visualisation product, Inline, at transportation shows across the US. This is so important because it further shows how complementary Geocortex technology is to Esri’s outstanding ArcGIS platform.
  • Next was a product talk, with partners being invited to influence the roadmap by voting on a series of possible projects. Our votes very much influence the direction in which Geocortex software development evolves.
  • Following this there were many other valuable talks. A point of note is that there will be a licensing change to a subscription-only model from Jan 1st
  • As the industry moves increasingly towards subscription licensing and cloud deployments, Geocortex Web has a new SaaS version coming out in October with a very much improved user experience. The user will be able to configure just about anything they want, for example having the results table appear on the right instead of the left, and having multiple data areas for simultaneous 2D and 3D map displays.
  • Geocortex Mobile continues its rapid development and will have similar capabilities to Geocortex Web in the near future.
  • Geocortex Inline – the linear referencing product in the family - will be productised in the future so will come with templates and documentation to make set up easier for the user to configure.
  • Geocortex Analytics has just released version 1.5 with better monitoring and fine-grained control of what is seen. You can now monitor individual ArcGIS Socs to understand usage.
  • Geocortex Essentials’ Builder Edition products (Geocortex Workflow, Geocortex Reporting, and Geocortex Printing) are already compatible with Esri’s Experience Builder even though the product is not yet generally available. Thus, continuing the Latitude promise of future proofing your applications.

There’s so much new and interesting stuff available and coming in the Geocortex product line that I would really encourage current users, and those producing applications using ArcGIS, to have a really good look at what the “Geocortex Essentials 5-Series” products can add to the already excellent Esri technology platform.

Join us for the next Geocortex “Extending Esri ArcGIS®  to improve your productivity” Day on 16th October 2019 in Cambridge

This FREE event will include an overview of the latest Geocortex capabilities for people who are new to this family of products. For those already using the products, or who are using Esri’s Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS, we’ll also review the latest exciting product releases of Geocortex Essentials and the Geocortex “5-series for ArcGIS” product line, as well as what lies ahead on the product road maps.

This event is aimed at technical and non-technical delegates.