14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s on-premise variant of Bing Maps has evolved to the next level. At the start of this month, Vexcel Corporation, a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary, announced that version 2.0 of the Microsoft Virtual Earth Server is now available for customers. Essentially, with Microsoft Virtual Earth Servers, customers that want to use Bing Maps will be able to do so without having to connect to the Internet even a single time.
While Bing Maps can act as a platform for Cloud applications with mapping, search and location capabilities, fact is that usage scenarios inherently involve Internet connectivity. However, the software giant also has a solution designed to let government and enterprise customers restricted by the necessity to keep apps behind firewalls, or off the Internet entirely, to also take advantage of the platform. With Microsoft Virtual Earth Server, the Redmond-based company complements the successor of Virtual Earth, offering an on-premises intranet mapping platform built on Microsoft Bing Maps for Enterprise that comes to meet customer needs for which Bing Maps hosted apps will not do.
“We are excited to provide this new release of the Virtual Earth Server to the marketplace,” said John Lee, director of business development for Vexcel. “This release integrates powerful new geospatial capabilities from Microsoft with enterprise tools to efficiently ingest and manage customers’ geospatial content and it provides an easy and cost-effective mechanism to license the Virtual Earth Server for their organizations.”
Fact is that customers will now not only be able to buy Microsoft Virtual earth Server version 2.0, but will also have the possibility to license Virtual Earth Server via Microsoft Volume Licensing. The Redmond-based company has indicated that the move is designed to make it simpler for organizations looking to license the Virtual Earth Server to do so through their Microsoft Enterprise Agreements.
Chris Pendleton, the Virtual Earth Technical Evangelist for Microsoft, revealed the new additions to Microsoft Virtual Earth Server 2.0:
“- Silverlight Map Control – in addition to the AJAX Map Control for the Virtual Earth Server V1, you can now view your data in Silverlight - 3rd Party Data Aggregation – add new types of data directly to SQL Server 2008 including GeoTIFF and KML - Web Map Service Integration – a simple template allows you to ingest OGC WMS-compliant image server maps - Geocoding – address geocoding support for North America and Europe.”