Congratulations to Asher at our partners Tech-Pro, who has made his first sale of Toucan Navigate 2007 to a customer in India!
Also congratulations to Jean-Michel Davault at Hommes et Process and Clive Davies at D2i - both have passed the new Microsoft Office Groove 2007 certification exam. If you're looking for a partner to help with implementing Groove, then you should consider J-M and Clive to be your "go to" guys, if you're in the UK or France.
I've just uploaded a new release of Toucan Reporter 2007. This release, 2.0.11 features new icons for the application and the report files well as fixes for a couple of bugs.
Working with files in Groove seems to be a theme, this month. We're just finishing off a project for a customer who has lots of forms records with lots of attachments. This is affecting forms performance, as well as being unwieldy, so we're moving the attachments out of the forms tool and info a files tool. This makes them amenable to searching with our recent free Tocuan FileFinder application.
Here's the script that extracts the files from the forms tool, written in the Boo programming language:
/*
Class: ExportAttachments
Exports the attachments from a forms tool
*/
class ExportAttachments (GrooveScript):
def Main():
try:
space = Groove.GetSpace("DMS2")
formsTool = space.GetFormsTool("Billing")
data = formsTool.GetData("All Records", "", true)
table = data.Tables[0]
for row in table.Rows:
cust = row["CustomerName"]
purchaseOrder = row["PONum"]
rec = GetFormsRecord(row)
print "${cust}/${purchaseOrder}"
for attachment in rec.Attachments:
attachment.SaveToFolder("C:\\temp\\${space.Name}\\${cust}\\${purchaseOrder}");
except e:
ReportError(e)
I'm pretty happy with this - it expresses my needs clearly with (almost) a minimum of overheads. I particularly like the the SaveToFolder call which constructs the folder path using the variables declared earlier on. The only ugliness is getting the data with GetData, and then getting the zeroth table from Groove in two lines rather than one.
What about error checking you may ask? Well, it is included - at two levels. First, if there was any of the usual problems (space or tool not existing for example), you would see a warning message. GetSpace, for example, will post a warning message if the space does not exist. If something unusual happens, the ReportError script function will give you a detailed report.
Of course, I'm only going to take a part of the credit - the code responsible for integrating with Groove. The clarity of programming in Boo is down to Rodrigo B. de Oliveira and numerous supporting developers.
If you want to have a play with Bambuco - go right ahead and download it here.
Our main objective with Toucan Navigate is to help people create meaningful maps very quickly. If you're looking for readily-available datasets, try these two web sites. Both provide useful and free data that can be downloaded and displayed in Toucan Navigate. Once downloaded, with just a few mouse clicks you can start viewing them over the roads maps and satellite imagery from Virtual Earth. You can also edit these datasets to fit your specific needs.
Download Toucan Navigate and start mapping your data now.
Not only free, but useful too! We've created a small utility program to help you find files in Groove files tools.
The new release of Toucan Navigate 2007 is up. This release has some significant improvements to the Virtual Earth tile renderer, making for cleaner maps. We've also tidied up the UI and fixed a lot of bugs. You can download it from here
October 18th, we're running a webcast in association with the Microsoft Virtual Earth team. We'll be talking about how Toucan Navigate 2007 integrates with Virtual Earth to make it easy to assemble maps from data in Excel spreadsheets, Groove Forms and SQL Server. We'll also be highlighting the options that using a web/desktop hybrid application offers over straight web applications.
If your work has a geographic element, and you need to work in a team with people who may be in different offices, or no office at all, or even different companies, then we believe we've got something interesting to offer.Sign up here: Virtual Earth and Toucan Navigate for Offline Mapping & Collaboration
Bambuco Desktop is now available for download and to buy. This version incorporates the MapPoint address lookup engine directly and has a licensing application bundled with it. This version will run for for sixty days before requiring you to buy a full license, and each day is limited to twenty successful script runs.
You can find out more about Bambuco here, or visit the support forum here.
I've wanted to update our support forums for a while now - mainly to make it easier to find things, to make them accessible via an RSS reader and to reduce the burden of spam administration that the old forums required. To that end, I've created a new set of support forums and set them to be the default destinations for support from the product pages. For now, they are at this address: http://infopatternslicensing.com/forums/. Once I'm happy that they're working as desired, I'll remove the old forums and redirect the existing web links to point to the new ones.
We're releasing updates and full versions of all our software this month, and first off the block is GPSTray. This application connects to your GPS and lets you use a Bambuco script to send your GPS location to Groove, SQL Server or to anywhere else. If you've bought Toucan Navigate, contact us and we'll send you a copy of the update.
Here's a quick tutorial on how to get started with Toucan Navigate 2007, which we've made available this weekend.
1. Download the bits by clicking on the download button here. It's only a 2 mb download (if you already have Microsoft's dot.net framework 2.0 installed).2. Download, extract and save the sample files. There are three files (counties.dbf, counties.shp and fast food franchises.csv). These three files take up 1.5 mb of disk space.
3. Start the application and then select Add -> File from the Home (or the Format) menu and load the Counties file.4. In the next step of the wizard, you will be prompted to select fields. Change only the Style field by selectingState_Name from the drop down list.
5. In the next step you can select a specific color for each or any of the States. Optionally you can just click Next and then finish once you have seen the preview. You should see all the counties now displayed on top of the Virtual Earth map.6. Go to the Format menu. In the Object Style Section you should see one style for each of the States. You can now select a State and change its color by clicking on the Fill Color.
7. Now you can zoom in or out by scrolling your mouse wheel or dragging your mouse from top left to bottom right while holding the right button down (in) or vice-versa for zooming out.8. If you want to make the Counties file semi-transparent, click the Edit button in the Map Layers group and then change the Transparency value from 255 to 100 or so.
You should now be looking at a map similar to this one:
Try the same steps with the Fast Food Franchises .csv file and select Company as the Style. You should be on your way to taking advantage of Toucan Navigate by now. If you still have issues please log your questions in our Toucan Navigate Forum.
This month we will start delivering the new version of Toucan Navigate (2007) to our clients and also introducing a free version. Our focus this time around has been on delivering an application that combines what is most attractive about internet mapping applications (i.e. on-demand detailed maps and satellite images, address look-ups and routes) with what's attractive about desktop applications (i.e. privacy, offline work, rich user experience).
Here's a video of the new Toucan Navigate.
Since Microsoft was 'acquired' by Groove Networks, a few thing have happened:
Microsoft have recently published a very useful guide to your options for backing up your Groove spaces. You can find it here. It focusses on your options for backing up entire spaces which is useful for a security measure, but somewhat limited - you cannot do anything with a Groove space archive other than restore it.
A nice thing about the article is that it mentions some third-party offerings that make Groove backups easier - including Bambuco. The article doesn't really explain the advantages or disadvantages of the different approaches. With Bambuco you can do the same as the other suggestions - backup a space, but you can also do something much more useful, which is select what parts of the space are backed up. As an example of the latter approach, I've posted a script in the Bambuco Developer Center which lets you copy files out of a Groove Files tool based on the file extension.There are a bunch of good reasons for wanting to do this:
Today we are introducing our next generation of geocollaboration products at the North Carolina GIS Conference with Microsoft's Virtual Earth team. We have two new products, GeoBlogIT and Toucan Navigate 2007, which incorporate valuable lessons learned from working with our clients, the team at Groove (now part of Microsoft) and the Strong Angel excercises.
We'll be talking about both of these offerings in the coming weeks.
At InfoPatterns, we have been looking closely at all the issues related to upgrading from Groove 3.1 to MS Office Groove 2007. Why? In our case it is relevant to our business, both in terms of our operations as well as our product offerings. As a virtual company with people in four different cities on two continents, we use Groove daily to collaborate on business, technical and administrative issues. Our business is also about building companion tools to Groove that enhance the collaboration experience, be it mapping, reporting or integration with other systems.
Here's a couple of headline items you should be aware in terms of compatibility.Here are our recommendations before you upgrade to 2007.
We'll be running both Groove 3.1 and Groove 2007, so that we continue to fully support our users, old and new. What about you -are you staying with Groove 3.1, or are you migrating to Grove 2007? Send us your comments. We will gladly try to help you with any migration issues you may have.
