July 12

Contents

Editor's Introduction

This week I report on two releases by Autodesk and discuss computer-aided facilities management. Plus, 26 press releases (more than usual due to last week's holiday).

— Matteo Luccio

Autodesk Launches MapGuide Enterprise 2008 and Topobase 2008

On Tuesday, Autodesk unveiled MapGuide Enterprise 2008 and Topobase 2008, two products that enable organizations to share location, design and enterprise information across departments. For Autodesk's list of features and benefits, click here. According to the company, MapGuide Enterprise 2008, which uses the Internet to deliver data, builds on its support for open source software "to help public agencies, utilities and telecommunications customers extend the reach and value of geospatial information and knowledge through their organizations and beyond." Topobase 2008, which includes a new module for the gas industry, incorporates MapGuide Enterprise and AutoCAD Map 3D 2008 capabilities, as well as Oracle Spatial database technology.

Autodesk is playing up its interactions with the open source community. Lisa Campbell, Vice President of Autodesk Geospatial, says that "Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise 2008 reflects the open source community's input on the features most important to organizations, such as native support for Google Earth, while new Topobase 2008 features apply those enhancements to the specific requirements of utility companies."

MapGuide Enterprise 2008, Autodesk says, "improves enterprise users' ability to integrate design and spatial data from a variety of sources, develop new geospatial applications, and distribute maps and spatial data faster and more easily through dynamic Web pages or in the form of detail-rich, highly accurate and compact DWF files," while "new and improved functionality" make it "a powerful development solution," and "gains in performance, stability and interoperability deliver a stronger and more dynamic user experience." It cites DM Solutions Group as among the contributors to the product.

New features in Topobase 2008 take advantage of the Web for project workflow management, job creation and editing, allowing remote users access to enterprise data. Autodesk also introduced a new module for gas utility operators — including data models, workflows and business rules. Last year, Autodesk introduced a similar module for water and wastewater service operators.

MapGuide Enterprise 2008 is now available only in English, but Autodesk promises to release German, Japanese, French, and Italian versions "in the near future." Topobase 2008 will be available in English later this month and in German, Italian, and French "shortly thereafter."

I discussed these releases with Charlie Crocker, GISP, the Senior Product Manager for Map 3D, and Liam Speden, Product Manager for MapGuide Enterprise.

Crocker points out that Autodesk's core markets continue to be in telecommunications (cable, fiber, network management), utility (electric, gas, water, and wastewater), and government (public works, land management, and cadastre), where it sees "design as a critical part." However, he explains, while the company has traditionally approached these markets from a design standpoint, using CAD, it is now helping them move up the "geospatial value chain" — starting at the DWG level and going up to an enterprise GIS. "We are sticking with this strategy, something we rolled out last year," says Crocker. "We are organizing many of our applications and sales teams around this." Because there are five or ten CAD designers for every one or two people working with GIS, he explains, "We are focusing on enabling that much larger group to take advantage of a lot of the geospatial efficiencies we get."

He also cites global trends such as urban migration — this year, for the first time, the total size of urban populations surpassed that of rural ones — arguing that they have created a huge market for infrastructure.

At the core of Enterprise, Speden explains, is the technology to deliver CAD and GIS data over the Web. Last year, he says, Autodesk completely re-engineered MapGuide, "which led to the formation of MapGuide Enterprise to align it with Web 2.0 trends and also the release of the product as an open source project. MapGuide Enterprise maximizes the value of organizations' investment in CAD and GIS data, while cost-effectively delivering it to the broad audience. It was designed from the ground up to leverage the FDO data access technology, which is a central element in this whole ability to bring that data together." Crocker adds: "We are now providing you the ability to do more of the sophisticated editing and creating of information through the Web which was before more restricted to having to do it through the desktop clients."

MapGuide Enterprise includes native support for Google Earth. "We treat it as a client that can generate both 2D and 3D data, with greater flexibility and consistency," says Speden, "so that you can actually build applications that deliver accurate, timely, spatial data into the ubiquitous Google Earth client."

"What's so exciting about the 2008 release of MapGuide Enterprise," says Speden, "is that it is the first time that an Autodesk product has open source participation involved in its creation."

While most other Autodesk products focus on the design element, Speden explains, "with Topobase you are taking that and moving it into the 'as built,' the manage and operate end of a business' operation. It provides an open and flexible architecture, basically a framework, from the database through to the browser, and all the different tools in between that make implementing these systems much simpler and much less time consuming than previously."

Topobase, according to Crocker, "enables people who are not necessarily GIS-savvy to manage complex relationships and insure that the data stays in good shape. Topology is maintained on the fly."

For Crocker, "the real story" on MapGuide is FDO "and the fact that Topobase is also built on MapGuide. We have a very integrated product line and FDO is really a centerpiece of that. The open source community and even some private vendors are starting to build on top of the FDO technology, so we are seeing new providers coming out that Autodesk isn't responsible for developing, yet our products are able to leverage." The FDO providers, he clarifies, are not shipping in the box with this release. "The open source community, at its own pace, not in the context of our release cycle, is developing and growing the FDO provider set. So, because MapGuide Enterprise is built on FDO, we are able to leverage that growing base of FDO providers."

MapGuide Enterprise ships with both an ActiveX and an Ajax client. "Those are the ones that are used within solutions such as Topobase," says Speden, "because they provide a much more developer-controlled environment. We expanded to Google Earth because of the fact that it is virtually ubiquitous. Our users of quality data demand something that is actually more complex and that is what we are doing with the other two clients."

GIS and Computer-Aided Facilities Management (CAFM)

GIS Monitor often explores the relationship between GIS and other classes of software, such as CAD. I recently discussed the relationship between GIS and Computer-Aided Facilities Management (CAFM) — which integrates CAD and database management technology to manage room-, floor- and building-level spatial information — with David Jordani, President of the Jordani Consulting Group (JCG). The firm provides information technology consulting and systems integration services to facility management, building design, and construction industry professionals.

Every large organization that owns or manages facilities requires an enterprise-wide approach to make data about these facilities available to all of its information systems and databases — in support of such business processes as maintenance and operations, real estate/property, human resources, capital planning, inventory services, and information services. When thoughtfully planned and implemented, using a consistent spatial model, such enterprise solutions yield a large return on investment.

Since the early 1990s, JCG has been developing GIS tools as an alternative to traditional CAFM. Both GIS and CAFM systems are concerned with spatial data management and can be used regardless of scale — whether to describe a single room or large tracts of land. Unlike CAFM, however, GIS can also perform spatial analysis and geographic navigation and provides the opportunity to integrate infrastructure management with room-level detail, allowing planners to pinpoint the impact of various projects on building occupants.

"Our business model," Jordani told me, "is working with a variety of different clients — private corporations, government institutions, higher ed — focusing on the issue of managing their real property assets, both inside and outside their buildings. Many people, especially in municipalities, have been using GIS to manage the infrastructure. Large corporations, like Abbot Labs or General Motors, are responsible for assets on their sites, both outside and inside their facilities. That includes not just physical assets, in terms of the building systems and components, but also workflows and people. CAFM technology has been developed to deal with two major classes of issues. One is physical asset management — in terms of command maintenance, preventive maintenance, work order scheduling and tracking, warranties, repair history, and all of the assets in the facility, from boilers and mechanical equipment to the condition of roofing membranes and HVAC components." For these tasks, CAFM is complemented by computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS).

"The other one," Jordani continues, "gets into real estate, property portfolio, lease tracking, and space management — linking the utilization of space with personnel, being able to know what space is occupied by what groups, so that space can be charged back to corporations — as well as knowing what type of space is available, where it is located, what condition it is in, what its intended purpose is, etc." An emerging trend in this area is the use of real time sensors, depending on the relevant business processes and workflows. For example, Jordani explains, you usually don't need a real-time sensor to track the utilization of a space — though radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is making that increasingly easier. "It may be that even if someone is not in the space for two weeks, it is still their space. Maybe they are on vacation or traveling." Real-time detection, on the other hand, is increasingly used to track such things as air flows and temperatures and to alert mangers "when things get a bit out of whack," says Jordani.

"GIS is becoming a standard component in an IT infrastructure," he says. "We have an unusual use of ESRI software: we have taken the geospatial model and brought it inside the building. So, we'll serve up detailed images of floor plans using ArcGIS 9.2 and ArcIMS. For example, if someone wants to find where Mike Smith is sitting, they can go to a website at a kiosk, enter Mike Smith's name, and the system will go out and find information about the person, including a detailed floor plan that indicates where Mike Smith sits. If someone wants to know how many unoccupied conference rooms we have, or full height director offices, they can post a query to the website and it will find that across the organization's portfolio of space."

Users can also highlight a building and, if the data is there, drill down from an aerial photograph to the floor plan and images of the space. Property managers, Jordani says, are responsible for managing a continuum of space, from facilities outside of the building — roadways, walkways, land use, transformers, underground utilities — to those inside. "If we are going to shut off a gas line or a water line on the site, we want to have a network model so we know what buildings are going to be affected, because that may affect the process."

JCG integrates several ESRI components — such as ArcMAP and ArcGIS Server — with component technologies, such as CAD systems, used to create the drawings, CAFM systems, used to manage the relationship of space and utilization, and HR systems, used to manage personnel information. "So, it's kind of a system integration effort," Jordani says. JCG's coders customize and integrate for its clients commercial products from different vendors. "We'll do the business requirements and needs analysis, identify commercial products, then do the integration. We are finding that ESRI technology is the centerpiece for navigation and presentation of the content that sits in a variety of these other databases."

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