City of Troy, Michigan

Home to over 81,000 people, the City of Troy is located in the northern suburbs of Metro Detroit and ranks as the safest city in Michigan and among the top ten safest places to live in the United States. The City's IT department supplies GIS applications for its 500 employees and public applications for its citizens. The primary goal of their GIS program is to collect, coordinate, and provide geospatial information in a way that is easy-to-use and accessible to all.

Until recently, the City of Troy's web-based GIS program was being delivered through a highly customized ArcIMS application that was first deployed in 2002 and had been steadily enhanced over the years. Though successful and popular, the City recognized their approach faced a number of limitations, related to both the underlying technology and availability of staff to do the required in-house custom development.

After assessing the matur-ity level of ArcGIS Server, the City of Troy decided to make the transition to the newer technology. However, they still faced a problem in how they were going to transfer the existing functionality in ArcGIS Server that they had already developed in ArcIMS. With hundreds of hours of custom development invested into their ArcIMS application, there were a long list of requirements; this included features such as searching, reporting, and database linkages.

The City of Troy also had concerns about the lack of familiarity their users would have with the new ArcGIS Server interface. They knew there was going to be a break-in period where they would be fielding numerous questions around accessing functionality. They also did not want to give up control of their interface; specifically, the ability to address design considerations such as font size.

"Our migration to ArcGIS Server was a very deliberate undertaking," explains Alex Bellak, GIS Manager at the City of Troy. "Our existing ArcIMS application is a very important product that the GIS department provides the city staff. We needed to be absolutely sure that we would not be taking steps backwards in any areas before deployment."

With these considerations in mind, the City of Troy opted to complement ArcGIS Server with Geocortex Essentials because of its comprehensive and customizable feature set. "Using Geocortex Essentials, I was able to duplicate existing functionality in our ArcGIS Server application within weeks," notes Bellak, "and we saved hundreds of hours of time—and did it all without the involvement of a programmer."

An additional benefit of the new technology stack is the speed with which the City of Troy has been able to react to custom feature requests. With their previous ArcIMS application, linkages to custom data sources or reports would require substantial levels of programming and customization. According to Bellak, requests that used to take days or more to implement can now be immediately handled within hours.

The City of Troy's external GIS application went live in October 2008 and their internal application was unveiled in the first week of January 2009. By March, they plan to shut down their final ArcIMS service and shift completely to ArcGIS Server-generation technology. Future plans include developing custom applications that will provide crime reporting tools for the police department and custom data editor tools for the fire department.

A challenge that the City faced was deciding when to deploy their final ArcGIS Server application. "It seemed like every couple months dramatic improvements and features were being added," notes Bellak, "which made it difficult for us to draw a line in the sand and pick the set of tools and features we would choose to deploy. In part, this was the reason we waited so long to deploy the ArcGIS Server product."

"Looking back, I'm glad that we didn't attempt to make the transition to ArcGIS Server earlier or by starting from scratch," explains Bellak. "As an organization that demands a lot from their web-based GIS applications, I believe we chose the right path to flexibility and options for the future."

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