USA Imaging
Location Based Document Management
With a clearer picture of what is known, things happen faster cheaper and with more accuracy. A single city or government agency is amassed with data, about its land, its people and its properties. Bringing that scattered information of your world under one roof has been a defining part of network technologies. USA Imaging does just this by unifying the data you have at your agency and presenting it through the Enterprise Data window.
USA Imaging will help you unify information with GIS/document management.
Ready for change? Ready for unity? Ready for savings?
Enterprise Data Window
The Enterprise Data Window is a location based document retrieval and information unification tool. This software allows the user to search for documents by location, or by entering search criteria in the dialog box. Designed with the capability to index and organize documents using map locations as well as traditional document criteria you can easily set up the Data Window platform, integrate with other enterprise systems, and customize functionality that is intuitive to end users.
Tutorial
A case study : Once the Enterprise Data Window was used to integrate the customer service database, water & sewer accounts database and engineering our receptionist was able to handle 42% of the calls before transferring. Calls were only transferred and average of 1 time before the customer received the information they were looking for. The Data Window reduced the interaction with customer at the engineering & planning counter by more that 60% for those customers just looking for information.
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Deployment & Cost
We can develop a data management plan scaled to your organization. We provide ETL, maintenance and retrieval solutions which ensure data integrity and provide for efficient archiving. Data mapping technologies and techniques can assist you in locating patterns in large sets of data that reveal useful and strategic information about your business and customers.
Our Mapping professionals can provide assistance from initial planning to implementation and maintenance. We can provide surveying services , terrain modeling, photogrametry, GPS Field Inventories, COGO Conversions and Cadastral Base Mapping in support of our GIS projects.
Since 1991, we have been a leading provider of technical document management and imaging solutions and services. Our clients include industries such as manufacturing, engineering, utilities, government, aerospace and the private sector..
Cutsomize The data window to better fit your business need. The Window is able and ready to add what you need in order to further your productivity.
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Here are a couple videos we like to watch, when we finally had time away from programming. We hope they make you smile laugh and consider us :)
Of Interest
Overviews and tutorials
Solution's Overview
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Data
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Customized
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Tutorials
Focusing on Database
This approach to development takes a database centric approach to the types of information and data issues typically found in municipal government and utilities. If it can be done in the database it is usually developed there. This approach for many utility and municipal governments is ideal and critical for several reasons. One strategic reason is that the database is usually the most infrequently replaced software in in any organization. If your agency uses Oracle, Sybase, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, AS400, HP Eloquence or any number of database management systems to help manager your organization, these systems have probably been in place for years if not decades If your information management system is new I am sure the intension is that it remain in place for at least as many years as the one replaced. The characteristic of longevity regarding database makes it ideal for storing business logic as well as business data for municipal governments and utilities. This is the most overwhelming and compelling business reason for municipal governments and utilities to focus on the database. Another advantage to the database centric approach is that it helps prevent the creation of data solos within and across departmental boundaries in an organization. This is one of the most important strategic decisions in the information world your organization can make. The time, money and personnel used to focus on a database technology within and organization will do more to cut costs and increase production than in single information or data solution imagined.
Then searching on the web you will find the usually religious wars about whether business logic should be in the database layer or application layer. To avoid to much confusion about this very technical issue it should suffice to say we are focused on a range of issues found in a specific industry, namely municipal governments and utilities. The business decision to move your business logic next to your business data inside the database for municipal governments and utilities is well documented and well demonstrated. The debate over where the business logic should reside is a technical and academic argument. Our approach to the banking industry is to only put the data processing logic in the database but the business logic best works in the application server layer or middle tier not the database or presentation layer. So when you do your research and investigate this debate keep in mind both sides are generally correct. But we are working within a specific industry solving specific issues..
We found 3 compelling technical reasons for using a database centric approach - the first and foremost is that functionality built in the database can be deployed anywhere at anytime. Second, the database approach provides much more ownership and control over changing business processes and access to data. And third, by placing most of the data processing and business logic in the database, any middle tier application layer or presentation layer can access the same set of methods provided by the database to produce the same consistent results across applications. So whether the developers are using C#, Java, Delphi, PHP, JavaScript, VB, VB.NET, ActionScript, C++ or even MS Access (and the list continues), the access to database objects and methods remains consistent across any major program language or framework. This frees the developers to focus more on the user interface (UI) and it's relationship to the user. Keeping the application simple, powerful and fast.
THE IT / GIS INTEGRATION PROMISE
DRAFT NOT FINISHED
The substantial growth in many cities in the 1980s was characteristic of most municipalities in southern California today. City Councils and Water Boards alike have acknowledged not only their regions' demographic changes, but have also recognized how data and information are changing the way business can be conducted. Consequently, the challenges confronting municipalities and utilities in the coming years prompted local agencies to begin the process of office automation and systems integration. Tasked with providing comprehensive solutions to a wide variety of needs in areas such as administration, engineering, planning, community development, public works, finance, accounting, and operations, GIS quickly became a major component in the process of preparing for an agency's future. GIS at the time offered the promise of a more practical way to integrate this diverse data into a comprehensive whole.
Have the promises of GIS come to fruition? Well not entirely. There are many reasons for the apparent breach between the promise of GIS past and the reality of GIS present, but thanks to the major database vendors of today that gap is all but closed.
One major reason for the difficulty in GIS / IS integration is that in many cases GIS was implemented outside of the IS departments. The integration of GIS technology with mainstream business database technology has not necessarily been a technical challenge, but one of perceived need, acceptance and some politics involving both the IT and GIS communities. The early vendor presentations of GIS as a map centric information system naturally found its home in the engineering and planning departments in the early days. This inevitably led to many duplicate efforts when dealing with the two technologies, such as having a GIS manager and an IT manager, not to mention the staff duplications. This seems a bit ironic since the major selling point of GIS was to reduce data redundancy and staff duplication. As technology pressed forward one basic tenet has always remained a truth, "data is data", and spatial data was just another data element from the database and IT perspective.
Over the past 10 years there has been a significant trend to move GIS departments either next to or under IT hoping for better systems integration and efficiency returns along with improved cost of ownership.
The "data is data" approach was not a popular approach regarding spatial data at the time and a series of middle ware solutions were introduced to integrate spatial data with mainstream IT databases. Today the client is faced with a barrage of technologies, file types, marketing strategies and interoperability solutions to solve their business needs. But the data is data mantra has found it home in the GIS open source community and almost all major vendors now adhere to it tenets.
When GIS software was first introduced for public utilization, the spatial data was by nature propriety, and usually housed in some obscure datastore which was only accessible through the GIS vendor's software. This was the typical architecture of virtually all major GIS vendors during this period and was reflected in the early enterprise GIS implementations from the early 1980's up to the mid 1990's. During the mid 1990's the major RDBMS vendors like DB2, Oracle, and Informix became noticeably interested in spatial data storage and retrieval issues. As a result much of the technical GIS research in the 1980's regarding computational geometry, indexing techniques for spatial data, spatial modeling and spatial search algorithms issues involving relational models verses object models was thoroughly investigated.
But close to some 20 years later many of the data isolation issues are not disappearing. The addition of middleware usually can be regarded as performance enhancement software for spatial data stored inside a standard RDBMS such as Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, or the AS400.
If you are familiar with some of the major propriety data stores of the past regarding propriety file structures and their required middleware solutions for enterprise implementation, then you have experienced the pain of data migration from one "improved architecture" to the next. Spatial integration into business processes became more complex with every major vendor change to the datastore, file structure, or vendor specific spatial programming language.
Integration of spatial information into an existing system should be independent of the spatial datastore, file structure, or GIS software involved. The integration of mapping data into a business application is not the same as the implementation of an enterprise GIS application. An underlying reason is that spatial data integration or "map enabling the enterprise" is what is usually desired in the majority of the cases, but many times "spatially enabling the enterprise" is confused with software or system integration.
An Alternative to ESRI based Business Solutions
USA Imagings Software Solutions Division
Releases The Enterprise Data Window Powered by TatukGIS Technologies
USA-Imaging Corporations Software Solutions Division released their Business Solutions Framework in 2007. This framework helps address the difficult issue of bringing together data from legacy and specialized information systems used in government today. We accomplish this by unifying disparate data using the Enterprise Data Window Framework.
The Enterprise Data Window is a location based document management and data unification tool with a geographical user interface. This application allows the user to search for documents by querying a map, specifying a location, or entering search criteria in a document retrieval dialog. The map viewer module of the Data Window can be used to unify data from existing legacy or contemporary business applications from customer service, work orders, permits or utility billing, to name a few. This type of integration is managed under one user interface without disruption to the specialized applications and processes which currently exist. The Data Window is for every one's benefit, because most staff retrieves documents on a daily basis as part of their work flow. The Data Window can cost effectively be placed on every employees workstation. The document viewer module of the Data Window is designed to index and organize documents using map locations as well as traditional document criteria. You can deploy the document management functionality to various functional groups to more easily unify your data with other location based information across the agency. Document management functionality is used by employees responsible for the document management within the functional group or agency.
DATA WINDOW deployment strategies
Three deployment strategies are used by the Data Window. The enterprise deployment strategy deploys this application by just placing a short cut on the users desktop and deployment is complete. All applications and data are located on a server, the short cut points to the Data Window executable. This strategy is used for small groups or just to get the client up and running in seconds until there is time or a need to move to the local strategy. The local or briefcase strategy requires setting up the application and the map data on the local computer. This is nothing more than copying a directory to your local computer and you are finished. This strategy is used for maximum mapping performance. If you are dealing with 500,000 to 1,000,000 mapping features or just want to ensure the fastest performance possible then use this strategy. Of course hybrids of the two are very common. The third deployment option is the field deployment option. The field deployment allows the computer to perform many of the same functions in the field as it does in the office. This setup requires a database installation on the laptop or field computer and tools to sync the laptop to and from the office. Custom work order applications have been built to gather information in the field and sync this data back to the office.
Customer Corner
A typical customer is an agecny with about 1000 - 1,000,000 customers.
Technical Corner
Best of Breed Approach to Application Development
With a cadre of development platforms, languages choices, database environments and operating system choices at a developers disposal, USA Imaging made a strategic decision not to be a one size fits all solutions provider. USA Imaging's Software Solutions strategy regarding the application development environment encompasses three concepts. 1: The database should be able to reside on most operating systems found in the industry today, from different Windows versions, to various flavors of UNIX, and in rare cases the AS400 and the IBM Mainframe series. 2: The development languages used for the UI must keep pace with the Windows Operating system and .NET framework as well as support for building browser based web applications. 3: The GIS technology must be modern component software with available source code open to the developers, in addition to supporting both browser base and win32/.NET base environments.
Enterprise Data Window Specifications
The Enterprise Data Window requires no GIS or document management licenses. This is because the TatukGIS technology is the corner stone of the USA Imaging's Software Solutions Framework for both GIS functionality and document management capabilities. The TatukGIS Developer Kernel (DK) is a comprehensive GIS component (SDK) for the custom development of stand-alone, embedded, and client-server applications using object-oriented languages. The Developer Kernel is generally oriented to open standards and designed to comply with a number of OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) standards. Features include nearly 3,000 pre-defined coordinate systems, on-the-fly map layer reprojection, support for most vector, image, grid, and SQL database map layer formats (including 3rd party spatial server database formats such as Oracle Spatial, Microsoft Spatial, ArcSDE, PostGIS...) and most database engines (MSSQL, Oracle, DB2, Interbase, MySQL, SQLite...), and an extensive API with approximately 2,300 functions and properties. All data formats are supported in a native manner, without conversion to any internal or proprietary data format.
The Developer Kernel is available as multiple product editions organized by development platform: i) managed code .NET WinForms component, ii) ActiveX/OCX control, iii) .NET Compact Framework component, and iv) native Delphi/C++Builder VCL. Each product edition reflects the same or very similar framework, API, and technology. For example, exactly the same source code is used to develop an application using the DK.NET edition and the DK-CF edition. This means that porting a GIS application between development environments, e.g., Visual Basic, VB.NET, Visual C++, C#, .NET, Compact Framework, Delphi, C++Builder, etc., is possible without great difficulty.
Municipal and utility managers alike are increasingly relying on Total Cost of Ownership TCO as a methodology for quantifying IT investments. Past investments in financial and accounting software, permit and work order software, GIS and document management software to name a few have proven to be valuable tools, but maintenance of these tools from one technology trend to the next can be fairly costly. USA Imaging's Software Solutions has staff, services and products tailored to address the increasingly complex environment of information management as our choices become greater and data more abundant.
For our clients these products and services reduce the cost and time required for daily business activity. We do this by connecting or unifying the different data elements at your agency so they work as one piece of information. The first step, connecting your existing GIS mapping data with the agency or company's business documents. A document can be defined as a read only connection to an existing database like customer service, permits or a work order system or just to a traditional scanned copy of a physical document to be stored and indexed. Development of data maintenance processes and procedures is key. The goal is to reduce the amount of time and effort spent researching and gathering disparate data for any given project or location.
We can manage the full lifecycle of application and database development including but not limited to business requirement analysis, solution architecture, system development, and system deployment, client acceptance testing and final release.
Because USA Imaging's Software Solutions defines itself as a software solutions service provider and not a software vendor, and as such, no third party GIS or (Electronic Document Management) EDM software, and no 3rd party GIS or EDM licenses are required to put mapping and document management functionality on the workstation of all your staff. Our software solutions are designed with the cost benefits and administration advantages of a rich internet application (RIA) with the power and speed of a desktop.
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I can't TELL you how much time this software has saved my staff. Task that use to take 1/2 hr are now accomplished in 3 minutes.
All the documents seem to be right at my fingertips. If I know the area I am interested in I can find a document from almost every department just wanted to write and tell you what a great help you have been to our agency
D.Daniel Clerk
Document indexing has never been easier; 4 of our 5 departments now index their own documents. The result is that on the same piece of property or area of interest I have documentation from 3 other departments at desposal.
Engineering Sam Lung
When you need to do more with less... Consistent, accessible durable information is
What Our Clients
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