Recently, we’ve seen an uptick in demand in a couple of our corporate office sites with clients looking for MOSS/ArcGIS or MOSS/VE integration to provide spatial context for their corporate portal content for a variety of markets. Some time ago the company rolled up a product called Constellation that integrated ArcGIS Server with MOSS and now our Houston office has taken up the standard and gone to the next level with what I consider to be a great Web 2.0 implementation of the product.
Example Constellation Site
I trimmed the image above to loose the branded skin to protect the innocent as this is still in development and in demo stages at present but briefly the technologies involved are:
- ESRI ArcGIS 9.3 REST API
- Dojo
- Silverlight (via the Visifire product I noted in a previous post)
- MOSS 2007
The site is fully Ajax enabled and uses a custom callback webpart framework so the map, the charting components, the Dojo grid view, and the Dojo treeview all talk bidirectionally to each other to maintain data context. Also note the nifty VE-ArcGIS Server toggle buttons on the toolbar…VE and ArcGIS in the same map interface. The right side of the UI uses the Dojo grid for attribute display and the treeview to summarize documents stored in a DMS, all given spatial context and linked to spatial features in the map.
Kudos to Todd Buehlman and Fauzan Ahmed for giving form to ideas and getting this thing up and running. I’m excited that the team in Denver will have the opportunity to get our grubby mitts on the code and take it and run with it a bit. Integration of map content with MOSS security and other goodies are all on the agenda. For more info on Constellation keep an eye on this website. The content relates to the previous incarnation of the product but Todd will be updating it to reflect the new architecture and functionality in the next several weeks.
As this technology evolves internally and we become more ready for primetime deployments I’ll try to throw up a post or two with more specifics on the technology and implementation patterns…without giving away the farm of course.
