Empower the Insightful Enterprise
by Scott Caulk
February 12, 2008

January 28 was one of the most exciting days in the history of IDV Solutions. That day we released Visual Fusion Server 3.0 (VFS), a product that changes how organizations consolidate, compose, and collaborate around information. VFS is visual composite application software that consolidates information in the context of location and time. It's a platform for users to explore new opportunities, reveal hidden value, and share original discoveries. With this release we achieved three very specific goals: cementing our alignment with what the market is proving about SOA and MOSS, providing IT professionals with tools to quickly build on and extend the Visual Fusion platform, and empowering the end user to create and take advantage of the remarkable rewards that visual composite applications have to offer.

SOA & MOSS Flourish in 2007 — Ideal for VFS!
SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) became dominant forces in the business world in 2007. We put out a white paper on the symbiotic relationship between SOA and composite applications early in 2007 and it proved to be visionary. Gartner reports that 50% of all new "mission critical" operational apps and business processes were designed around SOA in 2007, and that number is expected to increase to 80% by 2010. The SOA revolution is upon us and the ROI story has been strong. Due to the inherent advantages of pursuing an SOA strategy, production time is going down, defect rates are going down, legacy systems are being leveraged again, and the social networking-Web 2.0 world is allowed to bring its advantages to enterprise applications.

SOA is fast becoming ubiquitous in the enterprise; similarly, organizations are adopting MOSS at the highest rate of any Microsoft server product in history. As of June 2007, over 85 million licenses had been sold. That is astounding. MOSS is an amazingly powerful SOA facilitator, collaboration platform, and general "glue" to bring together virtually all Microsoft servers, applications, and tools. SOA and MOSS are bringing new power to the enterprise.

Taking advantage of both SOA and MOSS, VFS 3.0 delivers the best visual composite application platform in the market today. It is tightly integrated with MOSS, extending it and geospatially enabling it. List and data libraries, KML files and feeds, Excel files, RSS files and feeds, SHP files, SQL Server data, WMS files and feeds, WKB data, ArcSDE data, GML files, documents, images, Web services from the internet, Web services made available by an internal SOA… all of these things can be collected, secured, geo-enabled, and composed into compelling visual composite applications with VFS. Powerful capabilities within MOSS such as Excel Services, Search, and the Business Data Catalog can all be leveraged to further the goal of multiplying the insight organizations derive from information. Leveraging both SOA and MOSS, VFS provides IT professionals with all the tools they need to quickly and artfully create actionable ecosystems of data, discussion, and decision making.

Making Life Easy for the IT Professional
We were deliberate in our design of VFS and made sure that developers, IT administrators, and system integrators would all be empowered to do great things with the Visual Fusion platform. Consolidated configuration, a GUI to create and maintain map layers, and robust error logging are all ways that we've made the process of building visual composite applications painless and even enjoyable. A newly developed SDK allows developers to create custom connectors to any data source, to implement custom business logic against data, to connect to third-party Web parts, etc. Additional product documentation is incredibly helpful and comprehensive troubleshooting guides are in process. VFS also has capabilities such as: a rules engine to conditionally format data, advanced spatial transformations to enhance data, and the inclusion of time as a primary data attribute. All of these combine to lead to profound communication opportunities to the end user.

It is our desire that our customers and partners will be able to build deep, multifaceted solutions leveraging the skills and expertise they already have. There are many talents which can be applied, talent in workflow process, Web service creation, data integration, business intelligence, etc. This was the second goal we set out to achieve with VFS: to enable IT professionals. The third goal was to provide a platform to create applications that empower end users to make more informed and insightful decisions.

Power to the User!
Empowering information workers and decision makers is the true end goal of leveraging SOA and MOSS and making the job of the IT professional easier. In our previous newsletter,. I talked about the top 5 reasons why Visual Fusion tells such a strong ROI story. My main point was that Visual Fusion has proven to be a tool that people enjoy using as well as a tool to gain insight into real business problems.

One of the capabilities that users enjoy most about the product is the ability to contribute to the composite view. They can bring in unstructured data from the workgroup, such as Excel spreadsheets, and with VFS 3.0 they can now add KML or SHP files. They can also add internet feeds of weather, news, WMS imagery, etc. My favorite story is when one customer had a user stumble upon a world poultry density map that was a perfect fit for their application. It easily dovetailed into the existing composite view and accentuated it quite nicely. It is a perfect example of how empowering the end user to contribute to the composite view greatly benefited the group as a whole.

Users can also add their own ad hoc points, lines, and polygons with associated datetime, descriptions, and links to other content. This annotation can be saved, shared, edited, and even set up as a default layer in the layer control. Plus, no GIS or DBA or programming or even MOSS expertise is required to do any of this. If users can browse a directory and put data into a spreadsheet, then they are empowered to do great things with VFS. On top of this are the collaboration that MOSS affords, the reach that SOA delivers, and the world-class RIA experience that IDV has diligently crafted into the product.

Information workers and decision makers, armed with the powerful tools, can produce amazing results. With VFS, non-technical personnel can build powerful visual composite applications out of the box, and IT professionals can build robust, complex ecosystems leveraging all the advantages that SOA and MOSS afford to today's enterprise. Additionally, developers can extend VFS to further customize the experience and usefulness of the product.

We set out to create a platform upon which enterprises could quickly build ROI-heavy visual composite applications, and we are excited to see all the different and original places that our customers will take VFS. Management of assets, territories, and supply chains… continuity and crisis management… market, asset, and territory analytics… complex views of the enterprise made simple, common data found within the workgroup made extraordinary… what will you do with VFS?!


For more information, contact: Sarah Wicker, Marketing Manager, IDV Solutions, 517-853-3755 ext. 226 sarah.wicker@idvsolutions.com.