LizardTech’s business is not only about compression ratios and lossless quality; it’s about making our customers’ jobs easier by providing the best GIS solutions around while still taking into account their current operations. While much of our team’s time during the last ten months has been spent building and launching LizardTech’s GeoExpress® and Express Server® software products, we’ve also worked (and continue to work) hard to ensure that these products remain compatible with other commonly used GIS software.

Based on your feedback, we know many of you manage workflows that include one or more pieces of Esri software and it is increasingly important for both LizardTech and Esri technologies to integrate seamlessly together. Supported file formats allow projects to run smoothly and make sharing data faster and more efficient. Everyone wins.

To that end, LizardTech has recently made available a free plug-in for interoperability between our Express Server and Esri’s server product, ArcIMS. Express Server 7 came on the scene in July offering exciting features such as added support for raster images encoded to MrSID Generation 4 (MG4™) format and the option to install as a 64-bit application. Now when used together, Express Server makes viewing images via ArcIMS up to 25 times faster!

We also offer free plug-ins that add support for MG4 raster data files in Esri’s ArcGIS Desktop version 9.3.1 and 10. Now Esri’s Arc users can harness the benefits of the new MG4 files that GeoExpress 8 produces, including support for compressing hyperspectral data allowing users to compress up to 255 bands of geospatial data.

You can download the plug-ins for ArcIMS, ArcGIS Desktop 9.3.1 and ArcGIS Desktop 10 here.

We greatly appreciate your feedback and suggestions for future releases, so thank you, and keep it coming!

Recently we were contacted by Alfred Sawatzky, a product manager for iFactor Consulting, who had a Smallworld-using customer interested in seeing how iFactor’s Web Maps Connector would perform when serving imagery via LizardTech’s Express Server® Software. Web Maps Connector provides access to the data and services provided by Microsoft Bing™ Maps in GE’s Smallworld applications.

With a copy of Express Server, Alfred created a simple workflow within the corporate firewall where he demonstrated how to use Express Server to serve a potential customer’s internal MrSID® imagery overtop Bing data from the cloud within Web Maps Connector. In this demonstration, the customer has MrSID imagery of Pennsylvania that is more recent than the imagery from Bing and they wanted to expose their current imagery over the old to ensure they’re dealing with the most up to date data.

As Alfred mentions in his blog, “sworldwatch”, although GE’s Smallworld SOMs (spatial objects managers) provide a plug-in for viewing MrSID files, “The nice thing about using Express Server is that it does all the georeferencing/tile-stitching for you so you no longer need to configure a MrSID SOM with things like multiple path names, coordinate system, etc. You can use the GE WMS SOM to simply connect to the Express Server layers and you get all the imagery stitched together.” You can “leave the MrSID file access to Express Server and enjoy a seamless cross-tile experience in Smallworld using the Web Maps Connector module.”

This is a new and exciting prospect for both iFactor Consulting and LizardTech, who can now offer another great software solution to Smallworld customers working with MrSID imagery.