Welcome to GISWeekly! At the 2004 CTIA Wireless Expo recently Microsoft Location Server (MLS) was announced, a product that allows developers to acquire real time location of mobile devices within their own business or enterprise. With this news came the announcement that mobile operators, Sprint for the U.S. and Bell Mobility for Canada, are Microsoft's first partners to embrace the Location Server to build plug-ins or extensions to build real time location into their applications. Learn more about this product and how it addresses privacy issues in this week's Industry News.
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Industry News
A Mobile Enterprise Solution
By Susan Smith
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Hitachi G1000 device running MapPoint Location Server |
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“For instance, a sales force automation application- maybe a sales manager at the home base wants to pull up a map on her Windows XP desktop that shows where the sales force is in real time,” suggested Lombardi. “So that she can do some analysis on what territory for the day's calls who needs to go where. You don't want to switch out to a dedicated application right within your existing sales force automation application. You want to be able to view that information. MLS allows developers to build that functionality into those applications.” Some of Microsoft's early partners, namely, Action Engine, Immedient and Cubistix have built applications for their customers that illustrate the value of the Location Server.
Partners
Immedient is a Microsoft Gold Partner that has been developing Microsoft technologies for over a decade and has been developing on MapPoint technologies for the last year. “What they've built is a newsroom application for a large global news agency which has trucks and reporters across the country and around the world,” Lombardi explained. “When news breaks and they get a call from the newsroom, they've used a very manual process of finding out who is in the vicinity by calling out to various truck drivers and reporters that they believe are nearby, and asking where they are. Now in the dispatch center they can actually pull up a map on big plasma displays in the newsroom and see where each truck is located. They can now optimize who should be covering this event.”
“Cubistix has been building on our CD product, MapPoint 2004 -one of their customers is a bread company in New Jersey called Pechters. They roll approximately 70 delivery trucks out of their central bakery each day, those drivers go as far as Connecticut, Lower New York State, and Pennsylvania. They could be 150 miles from home base; a call comes in asking for them to deliver 40 loaves of rye bread for a big catering job that just came up. Normally they would have run another truck up there. Now all they have to do is pull up a map in real time and see who is nearby. They SMS out to the drivers to check on their real time inventory to see who can best serve that customer.”
Privacy Controls
Of course, privacy controls are a big consideration. “Unlike MapPoint Web Service which is hosted by Microsoft, Location Server is hosted by the enterprise and exposes its functionality to any developer at that company who wants to use it,” said Lombardi. “There are more privacy concerns here, so we architected this piece as a real server product that would be hosted by the business so in the case of that bread company, for example, they would purchase Location Server much in the same way they would purchase a Microsoft SQL Server, install it and control it inside their IT infrastructure. It keeps private information, personal settings about mobile phones' locations within the enterprise, in their IT infrastructure.”
Realtime location from the wireless operator networks including all the good mapping and driving technology, together with location technology in the Microsoft MapPoint Web Service 3.5, and GIS mapping tools for developers are in Location Server.
Real time location hasn't really taken off for businesses, Lombardi noted, and the reasons why it hasn't worked is because of privacy issues and the lack of a good developer platform. “They were using very high end GIS tools to solve a very small problem, A developer who is building mobile location based services applications needs only 10 % of that functionality,” said Lombardi. “What we try to do is focus on that 10 % for mapping, driving directions, and street level geocoding. That's what we are going to give you and we're going to make it really easy. We've had people get up and running building these applications in five minutes, whereas in the past it took a long time to build location based services with a GIS system.”
The typical enterprise today also has more phone networks to interface with, so with the MLS plug-in architecture, they can choose the plug-ins they need for the various networks they are supporting and install them on their server. “We are implemented as a SOAP/XML API, and it makes it easy for developers to work cross platform, cross device,” Lombardi said, adding: “These are the same benefits our web services had for years; now our Location Server has the same architecture and the same benefits. It means developers learn one single API that then works across all supported geographies and mobile networks. They can then work on different brands of phones, different wireless operator networks, and different operating systems. The product has a privacy framework right in the API that developers have access to, to allow them to build into their applications things like user permission, and opt in. When I add someone to my location enabled contact list they have to reciprocate. It's much like adding a buddy to my MSN messenger buddy list.” The end user can turn on and off his location at will.
