Single View Platform

While I was relaxing on holiday we unveiled the Single View Platform (SVP) at the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation Conference (GEOINT 2008).  Here is a snippet from the official press release:

At the GEOINT 2008 Symposium this week, Microsoft Corp. continues to highlight its numerous contributions to the growing market for geospatial software offerings with the unveiling of Microsoft Single View Platform (SVP), a collaboration and data visualization platform that provides government agencies with solutions for one comprehensive geospatial view of critical data. Microsoft SVP provides a single, geographic view of complex information and data sets across multiple roles, locations and user interfaces, which can vastly improve agency communication, collaboration and decision-making, and significantly increase the success of government missions.

Of course central to this the imagery used by Virtual Earth.  There was some great news in October as Microsoft and DigitalGlobe signed a multi-year deal giving us access to some of the best satellite imagery available, and to me even more importantly is that a lot of the new images will cover areas of the globe where Virtual Earth has not traditionally been strong.

The Single View Platform is not a new product in itself, but rather a group of existing products brought together under a banner for a specific problem domain (like CSP).  For SVP it brings in Virtual Earth, SQL, SharePoint, PerformancePoint and a whole host of other products.  The advantages of this approach were rather nicely summed up on another blog:

For those of us who have chosen the Microsoft platform, the good news is that we have many products from which to choose. Microsoft has an array of server and client products, as well as online services, that cover everything from collaboration to commerce, business intelligence to geographical information systems, personal productivity to accounting.
Sometimes the sheer number of choices can be daunting, so Microsoft is initiating new offerings that help us weave the various products into cohesive solutions. The goal is to bridge the gaps between product groups and provide additional documentation and code to integrate multiple Microsoft products.

Very nicely put!  I really hope that we see more of these frameworks from Microsoft.  They allow us tackle a problem by grouping a set of our products together, and then producing documentation, guidance, demos, samples and so forth directed at solving the specific problem space.

So how does this relate to CSP?  We are effectively going to be using SVP to provide our geospatial capabilities, utilising the work that they are doing for Local and Regional Governments.  We will be bringing one of the SVP demo’s into the core CSP demo image, which fits nicely at a technical level as we are already utilising SharePoint and Live extensively.

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