Zwolle Municipality, Netherlands

Located one hundred and twenty kilometers (seventy-five miles) northeast of Amsterdam, Zwolle (pop. 115,000) is the capital city of the province of Overijssel, Netherlands.

In early 2007, the municipality issued a Request for Proposals seeking a Dutch company to assist with building infrastructure to help the municipalities’ one thousand employees better leverage geographic information. Zwolle Municipality had been using a plug-in based viewer product, but wished to improve and extend functionality—and begin to realize their vision for geospatial integration provided through direct integration with existing workflows and corporate databases, rather than via mapping viewers. They also envisioned short-term web-GIS applications to support specific projects that could be easily created on an on-going basis from an existing MXD.

Geodan IT, a Netherlands-based IT firm and Geocortex implementation partner, was awarded the project in partnership with ESRI Netherlands. Wanting to take advantage of next-generation capabilities, Zwolle preferred to implement ArcGIS Server—provided certain functional requirements could be immediately achieved. Geodan had considerable experience implementing ArcIMS with Geocortex IMF, and knew that Geocortex Essentials 1.1 contained the functionality they required for the initial Zwolle applications: redlining tools, saved project options, and printing.

Zwolle staff had an immediate requirement for adding comments and markup to maps that could be printed or sent to others for review. The first production application was launched in October 2007. To date, Zwolle has deployed five unique production sites for about eighty users total, with numerous other applications planned for deployment at a rate of about one per month.

Starting with a basic site that provides geocoding on a simple map, the project team works with stakeholders to determine the adaptation required to create an application tailored to a particular department’s needs. To do this, Zwolle is making extensive use of configuration capabilities provided through Geocortex Essentials Manager. According to P.A. van Capelleveen, Manager of Geo-Information at Zwolle Municipality, Zwolle is “happy with all the standard functionality, and especially the help in structuring our site management.”

Some development work was performed using Beta software, while Geodan leveraged Latitude’s work to support internationalization in translating Geocortex Essentials into Dutch. “I stopped telling Geodan and Zwolle about nascent features we were coding, because they’d start planning to implement those features by our next phone call,” quips Drew Millen, Products Manager at Latitude Geographics, “but all kidding aside, they were instrumental during development of Geocortex Essentials 1.2 because they were pushing the limits of what we were building on a daily basis—and in the real world.”

“Because we used Geocortex Essentials’ ‘out of the box’, functionality, it gave us time to concentrate on building custom functionality for Dutch and Zwolle specific requirements, including a SOAP service presenting data from another corporate system, a Dutch geocoder, and a photo viewer that displays 360° imagery,” explains Sander Vlotman of Geodan IT.

As very early adopters, Zwolle has experienced a number of ArcGIS Server-related challenges. “Starting out several months later in the lifecycle of ArcGIS Server than we did would’ve made things considerably easier,” notes Vlotman, “but I think everyone’s happy with the progress made and Zwolle is very well positioned for the future.”

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