On Monday morning our speaker from Thames Water had a personal emergencey and was unable to present his scheduled seminar on Enterprise GIS. We were very fortunate to have Dan Lemkow, who is very familliar with the Thames Water project, present our second seminar on Tuesday, Noveber 16. We hope to reschedule the Thames Seminar later in the GeonetCom series.

Dan Lemkow, Product Director for Server and Applications Products in the Autodesk GIS Solutions Division gave the second presentation in the Geonetcom Series entitled "Ingredients of an Enterprise GIS." Dan explained that more and more organizations are evaluating the advantages of an enterprise GIS.

Organizations that can benefit from an enterprise GIS include those that need to improve group productivity and overall business performance. These are organizations that must create and manage large amounts of data in a multi-platform, multi-application environment and share those data across multiple organizational boundaries. These organizations must also leverage both spatial and nonspatial data to ensure the success of internal and external customers. Spatial data in these organizations are typically a combination of vector, raster, CAD, and nonspatial data 'owned' by different departments within the enterprise.

As Dan stated, organizations today are faced with the complexities of implementing GIS solutions that ensure the integrity of their data by adhering to internal and industry standards for each data type. To implement a successful enterprise GIS, the organization must also provide for a scalable environment that includes GIS, CAD, versioning, and database functionality. And the enterprise environment must be able to integrate different application architectures into one coherent system.

The best way to ensure a successful enterprise GIS project is to select business and technology partners who have proven experience implementing such solutions. Autodesk, the world leader in CAD-GIS-database integration, offers those assurances through the Autodesk GIS Solutions Division and its partners and value-added service providers. This team can use the scalability of Oracle, the versioning capabilities of Vision(tm), the integrated CAD/GIS power of Autodesk Autocad-Map2000, and the ease of deployment and maintenance of Autodesk MapGuide to distribute spatial and nonspatial data to your organization.

Autodesk teams have implemented successful solutions for such organizations as Thames Water, U.S. West, and First Energy of Ohio. These projects typically start with all server functions on a single machine and evolve to the point where dedicated servers control specific applications, e.g. work management, GIS, CAD. The main difference between the Autodesk model and other approaches is that Autodesk's allows all information to be stored in Oracle, ensuring a consistent, up-to-date database that allows other applications to access your data more efficiently. Autodesk teams ensure the integration of best-of-breed technologies and services.

If you missed Ingredients of an Enterprise GIS, you can catch it LIVE on Thursday, 9AM Pacific/Noon Eastern, as always, at http://www.geonetcom.com.

POWERPOINTS TO BE POSTED FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1999
We have had an overwhelming number of requests for the slides from our first two seminars and we will be posting them on GeonetCom this Friday. If you would like to download the slides, come to http://www.geonetcom.com, click on the "Archive" button at the top of the page. We will also be posting QuickTime Movies of the live presentations in the upcoming weeks.

NEXT SEMINAR, INTERNET GIS FOR THE MUNICIPALITY
Our next seminar is scheduled for Tuesday, December 7, and is our most popular! We will have an actual demonstration of the internet GIS application Las Vegas Water uses everyday day to speed thier workflow. It is a "must see" presentation for anyone interested in seeing the future of GIS in government services. If you would like to register for this seminar, please come to http://www.geonetcom.com and click on the "Seminar Registration" button at the top of the page.

Join Autodesk, PlaceWare, URISA, GeoCommunity, GeoPlace.com, Directions Magazine, and USGS for GeonetCom, the world's most comprehensive GIS-focused virtual seminar series.

Ernest Berghof, Autodesk America


www.geonetcom.com