At this year’s Esri User Conference we asked our customers, who love our plastic lizards almost as much as they love our software products, to submit a story either about their experience with GeoExpress or about lizards — live or plastic — and we’d pick a winning story from each pile. We got a lot of amazing stories.

Okay, Tyrannosaurus is not a lizard in the scientific sense, and none of the stories were about T. Rex.

Thank you to everyone who participated.The authors of the two stories we selected as our favorites each win an iPad.

With a classic narrative of struggle and triumph that we never get tired of, Matthew Woodworth of TranSystems in Kansas City, Missouri writes:

My organization deals with fairly large amounts of raster data, and a very small storage budget.  About 2 years ago we were confronted with the situation that, not only had our server dedicated to store our raster data become completely full, but we had nearly 1Tb of GeoTIFF data provided by a client sitting on an external hard drive and nowhere to store it on the network. 

We looked at quite a few options to fix the issue including expanding our network storage, when we came across GeoExpress by LizardTech. My IT department was very impressed at the idea of compressing existing data to reduce storage space and I, being the GIS department head for my organization, had used MrSID files for years and loved the idea of not being forced to store my data offline.

We decided to purchase GeoExpress Unlimited and have never regretted it. I went from exceeding my server capacity by 25% to having nearly 65% free space afterwards without losing any information. As of the date of this letter I have not quite utilized 50% of my capacity after over a year’s worth of adding data.

Thank you LizardTech.

And from Thomas Hardy’s own Wessex region in England, Andy Nicholson of Wessex Water in Bath asks the thrilling question:

My GeoExpress Lizards – Thiefs in the Night or Innocent Bystanders?

Every quarter we complete MrSID conversions for distribution across the GIS fileservers. Last year in the office not only did we notice we were getting older – our recollection of the required settings for MrSID file creation had got so bad they had to be written down – but we also started to doubt our own sanity. It all started when someone left a Mars bar on my desk. The next morning we all noticed it showed signs of being nibbled by some small creature. We also noticed that the two LizardTech lizards that sit atop my screen – one green the other green and orange – had swapped sides.

For several days we observed they moved sides and each tasty treat we left for the “thief in the night” was nibbled or eaten completely. It was time to catch the culprits “red clawed”. We positioned a web cam to capture the crime scene. For a couple of nights nothing, then one night much to our relief we caught the thief in action:

In flagrante delicto.

The LizardTech lizards were proven innocent. Mind you, to this day we don’t know how the lizards changed sides on top of my screen.

Congratulations to Andy and Matthew. And again, thanks to all who sent us stories. We’ll see you again at next year’s user conference if not sooner!

We’re excited about the release of Express Server® 7 image serving software. You already know that Express Server is the fastest, most stable, and easiest way to distribute high-resolution raster imagery. Who doesn’t know that? But what you may not know is that besides running as a 32-bit application as it always has, Express Server also can be installed as a 64-bit application on 64-bit systems, which means you can take full advantage of increased memory for performance gains.

Express Server 7 is available now.

And that’s just one reason to look at the new version of Express Server. Here’s another: support for MG4™, the latest version of LizardTech’s MrSID® image format. Through the use of alpha bands, MrSID Generation 4 enables true transparency, which means Express Server 7 can deliver better looking mosaics.

Even more exciting, MG4 supports multi- and hyperspectral imagery, and Express Server 7 enables you to specify any three bands to serve out. You can create any number of band-mapped catalogs so that any image in a given catalog will be served with your desired band arrangement. You can also use the same image for any number of band groupings. This gives you unprecedented flexibility in serving imagery for your geospatial end users.

We hope you like Express Server 7 as much as we do. If you’re at the 2011 Esri User Conference this week, stop by and visit our team at Booth #1311. They’ll be happy to talk with you about image delivery or any other needs you have.

For more information about Express Server, visit http://www.lizardtech.com/products/exp/.

LizardTech is moving toward more frequent releases and a bit more of an agile development schedule. We decided we could use a dedicated engineering manager to focus on the issues inherent in quicker turnaround and we found that person in Rich Estrin.

Bringing software products to market.

Rich is a guy who’d rather be developing software products than talking about himself and having his picture taken, but we did get some info out of him so that you’ll have some conversational hooks to engage him with when you start seeing him in the LizardTech booth at trade shows.

For one thing, he’s a vintner. That’s right, he and his wife are winemakers. They own a fully functional and licensed winery and run the cellars out of the basement of their home in Issaquah, where they live with their two kids. Their first commercially available red will be released at the end of this year.

The Grape Whisperer.

Rich brings over 17 years of commercial software development experience to LizardTech, with the last twelve years increasingly focused on leading software teams and projects. He has worked with a broad range of technologies and domains from enterprise life science research software to desktop business software. Rich earned a BA in Computer Science from the University of Washington.

We’ve had some emails from people who are having trouble viewing MrSID images in Esri’s ArcGIS Explorer. We dug around and found out that our friends at Esri had already been notified of the same issue and they’d already discovered that the problem was undefined projections. MrSID images are sometimes created from TIFFs that have no projection information, or the projection is written to an AUX (.aux) file but not included in the actual MrSID image.  

Esri has posted an article on how to fix the problem for immediate viewing using ArcCatalog. Click here or enter this URL in a browser:

http://blogs.esri.com/info/blogs/arcgisexplorerblog/archive/2009/
03/05/projections-and-mrsid-images-for-explorer.aspx

Of course, defining the projection in ArcCatalog only writes the information to an AUX file, not into the MrSID file itself, which would be a better practice. Users should ask their data provider to include the projection system (LizardTech’s GeoExpress® software calls this the coordinate reference system or CRS) in the metadata of the MrSID files they deliver.

As for any images you have already, if you know what their projection is and have access to a licensed copy of GeoExpress, simply add any number of MrSID images of the same projection to the GeoExpress Edit Metadata tab and specify that projection for all of them at once.

Adding projection information to images by using the Metadata tab in GeoExpress. Click for a larger version.

To edit the metadata of existing MrSID images using GeoExpress:

1. Load images into the Edit Metadata tab of the Job list.
2. Select applicable image(s) and choose Metadata from the Options menu. The Metadata Manager dialog appears.
3. Select the Image tab. Click Select Coordinate Reference System. The Coordinate Reference System Selector appears.
4. Select a projection system using the drop-down menus and then click OK.

You can also use the GeoExpress command line tool mrsidgeometa to add a well known text (WKT) string. The syntax is as follows:

mrsidgeometa.exe -f <filename.sid> -awkt <WKT string>

Our surveys consistently indicate that people have an uncommonly good experience when they contact LizardTech Support with a problem. We thought you’d like to know a little about how we support our customers and how our Support team feels about doing that job, so we sat down with our Support guy Dave, a person you’ve probably met if you’ve ever hit a snag using any of our products, and asked him a few questions.

Who is LizardTech Support? How big of a team are you and where are you located?

LizardTech Support is me, and if I get overloaded our sales engineer assumes the role of wingman. We sit smack in the middle of the LizardTech offices, instead of several continents away.

You seem to be making a point about being local. Is that important?

I am and it is. When you call LizardTech Support, your issue isn’t lost in a sea of tech support operators who don’t care. You’re not contacting a call center. Because we’re local we can attend engineering meetings to make sure we understand our products and our engineers understand the needs and experiences of users. There’s a small group here and we’re dedicated to resolving your issue.

What main idea would you want to communicate to the people who contact LizardTech Support?

We’d want you to know that we’re accountable. We’re not looking for proof that the problem is not our fault – our goal is to help you get back up and running.

How do you get people back up and running?

First we find out what product you’re having issues with. To do that we find your account, locate you in our database. Then you and I discuss your desired output and what you’re experiencing that’s preventing you from getting there. You may not be going about it the best way possible. There may be a better way and we’ll train you in how to do that. Rather than just hit the reset switch for you, we’ll “teach you how to fish”.

Is it always that easy?

Often but not always. Many issues are quite common and we can send instructions that we’ve already written out. If we find that a lot of people are confused about the same issue and that we keep having to clarify it, we’ll work with our documentation guy to turn our written instructions into a knowledge base article, so you should always check there [here] first to save yourself time. For problems that we can’t address off the tops of our heads, we do our best to reproduce in-house the error you’re seeing and try to learn what the problem is. Again, maybe there’s a better procedure we can suggest. If there’s an actual bug in our software, we take it to Engineering and it gets dealt with there.

How do you prefer to communicate?

By email. Since we deal a lot with images, we prefer email contact because we can send attachments, and there is a record of instructions that both we and you can fall back on. If you communicated with me three years ago, I still have your email. As noted before, these communications also form the genesis of our knowledge base articles.

What are the issues that customers come to you with most often?

Licensing errors, by far, and a lot of those come as users upgrade to new computers. Those we can usually sort out pretty quickly. Another big one is reprojection – customers using GeoExpress to reproject imagery – because it involves a lot of fine details and variables and it can become confusing. 

What is the best way for customers to help you help them?

Consistently, the biggest delay for me in helping people get back up and running is a lack of specific job and product related data.

What kinds of data? Can you give us a handy list of things we should have before contacting you?

Glad you asked:

• product name and version number
• other LizardTech products you have installed and their version numbers
• which operating system(s) you use
• how much free hard drive space your computer has
• how much RAM your computer has
• the type and size of the files you are encoding
• for Express Server administrators, copies of your configuration files
• the task you were working on at the time the problem occurred
• the command you typed prior to the problem, if applicable
• the exact error message, if applicable
• whether you have restarted the computer and attempted to reproduce the problem

That would be a good start. Screenshots are very helpful. Screenshots of error messages, screenshots of images that don’t look right. A picture really is worth a thousand words.

What other things can delay getting a user back up and running?

(Laughs) People don’t always tell me the truth. I don’t know why. Maybe they’re embarrassed about something they tried but think they shouldn’t have, so I don’t get the complete story right away, which may delay finding the actual issue.

What would you say to those customers?

I’d say “I’ve been doing support for LizardTech for over four years so if you’re not telling me the truth, I’ll know it.”