City of New Braunfels, Texas Deploys ArcGIS Server

Located between San Antonio and Austin and serving as the gateway to Texas Hill Country, the growing City of New Braunfels (pop. 51,000) launched its first web-based mapping application later than most-in mid 2007.

In December 2006, the City began building its enterprise GIS in earnest under the direction of its new GIS Coordinator, Mike Parma. With a goal of getting its geographic data to staff and constituents, the City wanted a tool that required minimal training and could help people get answers to geographic questions.

When ArcIMS was released by ESRI in 2000, many staff at City of New Braunfels didn't have desktop computers. In the intervening years, GIS use occurred at the workgroup level and was more product-driven than data-driven.

With some support from Latitude Geographics, City of New Braunfels launched its first web mapping application in June 2007. What is noteworthy about their application is that it is powered by ArcGIS Server. When launched, it was quite possibly the most feature-rich public-facing production ArcGIS Server application on the Internet.

City of New Braunfels decided to deploy using ArcGIS Server for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact it appeared to be the sole option. "During procurement we were under the impression that ArcIMS was no longer available for licensing, so we went directly to ArcGIS Server," chuckles Parma.

The objective was a quick win to demonstrate the power and benefits of the technology. While many organizations might have reservations about rolling out unproven technology to users, Parma's users had no particular pre-existing expectations. Rolled out to about two-hundred and fifty internal users shortly before being profiled in the local newspaper, things have gone remarkably smooth. According to Parma, performance and uptime haven't been issues.

The system is being used in unanticipated ways. Field staff have come up with clever ways to take measurements and estimate project costs before they leave the office. "I had never talked to some of these guys about GIS before they came to me to make sure what they were doing was correct.

"It's great. I think it really shows how intuitive and flexible the site can be," observes Parma. Although the City plans to implement a Web ADF-based architecture in the future, the initial application uses Geocortex IMF 5.1 using the ArcGIS Server Connector to provide functionality comparable to ubiquitous ArcIMS implementations. "We're getting all the benefits of an ArcIMS application, but we're positioned for the future," notes Parma, "and we're cautiously embracing the new functionality of Server".

Soon, City of New Braunfels is looking to leverage the power of ArcGIS Server to provide data dissemination and web editing for external agencies. The City's planned land and asset management implementation will rely on Advanced Edition to allow mobile communication and the tracking of work orders. Mobile capabilities are being explored for field address verification and editing vector data. Mike Parma is circumspect about adopting web-GIS technology so late that they're now actually early, "I guess we're more than dipping our toes in now-we're getting our feet wet."

[top]