The Town of Concord, Massachusetts recently unveiled their new MapsOnline interface. The Town wanted to integrate MapsOnline into their new municipal website provided by Virtual Town Hall, a new PeopleGIS Business Partner. To accomplish that goal, PeopleGIS simply integrated elements of the new Virtual Town Hall website into MapsOnline, and PRESTO!

The new look for Concord is not the only changes for MapsOnline in this community. The Town now has eight different MapsOnline websites serving various departments and specific needs. Concord has a Public MapsOnline site, a general Staff MapsOnline, a Public Works MapsOnline, an Assessor's MapsOnline, a Kiosk MapsOnline, a Natural Resources MapsOnline, a MapsOnline site that focuses on Invasive Plant Species, and a MapsOnline site intended to support a community engagement project regarding downtown zoning. The Town's goals are to provide the public and their staff with the access to GIS they need, the way they need it, at low cost. MapsOnline is meeting those goals.

PeopleGIS is pleased to announce our latest MapsOnline enhancement:  Save Settings. Users will notice a new link below your MapsOnline interface that enables you to save your current settings. Currently, this new function will save your Layer Status and Map Size. Therefore, if you like to increase the Map Size to fit your computer screen, and commonly turn certain map layers on or off to fit your needs, you can save these settings and they will become your personal default settings whenever you visit your MapsOnline site. This allows users to customize their MapsOnline experience. This new function can also save users alot of time...promoting the ability of MapsOnline to provide quick and easy access to GIS information.

All MapsOnline clients have been provided with this new feature in the past several weeks. PeopleGIS intends to extend this function over the next several months to allow users to save more settings and further customize their MapsOnline experience.

PeopleGIS recently developed a new extension that brings Document Management to MapsOnline. Working closely with several clients, PeopleGIS created a protocol for storing digital documents within a MapsOnline project, and linking those documents to points on the map.

Users can simply click on document points to retrieve lists of documents available for each location and review those documents online. In Concord MA there are 28,000 documents available to municipal staff through MapsOnline, including building photos, tie-cards, and more. The general public has access to parcel deeds and subdivision plans. Many of these documents were scanned by high school interns as a means of controlling the Town's costs.

There is no charge for the Document Management extension itself. PeopleGIS only charges for the time necessary to setup the extension for your MapsOnline site and establish a database for your digital documents.

Chief Ed Walker of the Weston Fire Department presented PeopleGIS with a challenge: create a MapsOnline site that can load his department's FireHouse® database in less than a minute with trouble free updating. Well, we love a challenge.

The Weston Fire Department's MapsOnline is available to the entire department. The FireHouse® database is exported automatically each time the Chief logs-in to his station. The Chief then uploads the FireHouse® data to MapsOnline with a single button click.

The resulting application provides the Weston Fire Department with maps of mutual aid calls, calls by type, calls by date, calls by shift, and more. Because the mapping layers are based on the FireHouse® database, each layer updates every time the Chief uploads the latest data. "This MapsOnline interface allows us to graphically see our calls for service", says Chief Walker. "This is particularly helpful to see trends or when making presentations. With the web interface I can always have current data displayed without having to rely on someone else's timetable. I can instantly display and manipulate my data."

There were so many great stories these past few months, it was difficult to choose which to share in this quarter's newsletter. We may have to publish more often!

We are excited about the FireHouse® connection we made in Weston, and look forward to more such applications in the months to come. We love the new interface designs as our clients begin to integrate their MapsOnline into their municipal websites. And we are truly amazed by our clients expansion of their MapsOnline experience through the creation of numerous staff sites.

We believe in our software, and we have never been more excited about the work we are doing. Look for more stories and some big announcements in the months to come...its going to be a very busy summer. We'll see you in the next newsletter.