Toucan Navigate 2007 - Getting Started

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.

Introducing Toucan Navigate 2007

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.

Searching for Groove information?

Since Microsoft was 'acquired' by Groove Networks, a few thing have happened:

1. Forums-based support has moved to the main Microsoft community-based forums,
   
2. Lots of people within Microsoft have started blogging about Groove.
   
3. The Groove-specific documentation has been scattered all over Microsoft's web sites.

This has made it a lot harder to find all the relevant content that might help make your Groove-life easier. To redress the balance, I've spent some time this evening creating a Groove-specific search engine using the Groove Custom Search Engine. You can find it here.

Backing Up Groove Spaces

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:

• Quick restore of files accidentally deleted within Groove
  
• Your files etc. are available for further processing such as searching,
  storage in corporate repositories or conversion to other formats.
  
• You can run Bambuco scripts as a part of a larger scheduled job.
  
• You could even copy selected files or other content from one space into another.

Launching New Products at NCGIS 2007

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.

Migrating from Groove 3.1 to MS Office Groove 2007

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.

1. Grove 3.1 accounts cannot be invited to workspaces created with Groove 2007. If your users not only create workspaces but are also often invited to workspaces created by others outside your organization (i.e. our case) they will only be able to accept those invitations if they upgrade.
   
2. Groove 2007 users can be invited to 3.1 workspaces BUT ...
   
3. 
   
   
   
   1. You need to set a configuration option. See this FAQ item at GrooveForms.com, our site for Groove Forms developers.
      
   2. Third party tools like our Toucan Navigate (version 2.1) or Team Direction's Project for Groove 3.1 which installed into the Groove user interface in Groove 3.1 cannot be installed nor will they show up in Groove 2007. This is the error message you would get if you tried to install an in-one. This situation doesn't apply to those tools developed by Groove which have been deprecated in the 2007 version (i.e. Task Tracker, Contact Manager, Document Review and other minor ones) - a rather sad thing to see for those of us who can remember when Steve Wilkinson and then John Giudice at Groove Networks were trying to create a third party community. Luckily in both our case as well as that of Team Direction, we've come up with more interesting tools as a result of Microsoft's decision. In our case, we've made the decision that our tools will work the same way regardless of which version of Groove you're using.
      

Here are our recommendations before you upgrade to 2007.

1. Review how Groove is used in your organization. If Groove has been used as it comes out-of-the box, there isn't much risk in migrating to 2007.
   
2. If you have invested time in building custom solutions based on Groove Forms and third-party tools such as ours, spend some time checking that those forms work the way you intended them to. Rember, you wo'nt get any benefit from using forms tools built for Groove 3.1 in Groove 2007. Consult your supplier for third party applications. We have been spending time with our clients discussing our new product offerings and status based on these changes and they have proven to be both beneficial and encouraging to us and them.
   
3. Stay in touch and check out the Groove forums available from MS as well as the partner community.
   

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.

Whats the story with Toucan Reporter 2007?

Since releasing Bambuco in November, I've been working on getting the next version of Toucan Reporter ready. We're getting pretty close I think. We've had a major rethink about how people use Toucan Reporter. Initially, I thought teams would have one or two 'reporting experts' on them who would design and (crucially) generate reports to be use by others both inside the team and outside of it. The design reflected that use.

Turns out, that isn't what people really do, or not all of them anyway. There are two camps of users - report designers and people who want to see the reports right now without needing anyone else. To accommodate these two groups, Toucan Reporter 2007 has two modes of working - Designer mode and 'Just gimme the report preview' mode where the designer is hidden. Of course, you can switch between these two modes dynamically.

The other big change is that the new version is a proper multi-document application. There's a proper menu with File|Open, and all reports share the same parent window and menu. We've also taken out some of the more obscure report settings, favoring ease of use over customizability.

There's some other new stuff coming - better rendering to text documents, much nicer PDF output, full-screen previews and a new report wizard which makes it a lot easier to create multi-table reports.

We are going to be a more generous with the free version. It will work 100% the same as the paid-for version except that it will only print if you've less than fifty records in your Groove Forms tool. You'll get all the same access to the wizard, all the same export formats and all the same report features while you're getting used to Toucan Reporter, and I hope you'll be able to make the decision to put it into production use much more easily as a result.

Right now, the plan is to go with a public beta in the second week of January, which will close at the end of the month. At that point, there will be a price increase to $100. Anyone who buys during the beta period pay the old price of $70. Existing customers will of course get the new version for free.