Our Express Server product, a web-server add-on for distributing massive image datasets, has always been a fairly straightforward, simple product — it takes advantage of efficiencies inherent in MrSID and other image formats to make high-resolution raster imagery available at lightning speeds. But we found in listening to feedback from our customers that many of them were intimidated by Express Server’s XML-based setup and catalog configuration files.

Well, we’ve responded by updating Express Server with a spanking new graphical user interface that we call the Express Server Manager. We think customers will be thrilled. Now all you have to do to set up your Express Server and configure the catalogs is check some boxes, fill in a few text fields, and click a button or two.

Express Server 8′s interface for configuring a catalog looks like this:

Express Server image catalogs are easier than ever to configure and manage in the Express Server Manager, Express Server’s new graphical user interface.

On this Basic Properties tab, you can create a spatial index for a catalog, specify its projection (EPSG code), enable or disable the catalog (make it available for viewing or take it offline), and map image bands according to particular viewers’ needs. More advanced operations are on other tabs, but there’s no XML to fiddle with, just buttons, fields and checkboxes.

And that’s just the beginning. It’s really easy to stop and restart your Express Server, check whether or not it’s running, consult error logs, restore a previous configuration from an archive and even license your copy of the software. All this can be done on the Status page, which looks like this:

Administrators can start and stop Express Server, license their copy of Express Server software, consult logs and recover previous configurations — all from a single page in the Express Server Manager.

Version 8 of Express Server also introduces support for Geospatial PDF, so you can take advantage of PDF source imagery and serve a broader range of users.

It’s easy to take Express Server 8 for a spin, too. You only have to download and install it once — the trial version is the same installation as the permanently licensed version. If you like what you see and purchase the software, you simply copy and paste a license code that we send you and your Express Server is street legal. Try it today!

The free 30-day trial is available here: http://www.lizardtech.com/downloads/category/#free_trials.

To learn more about Express Server visit http://www.lizardtech.com/products/exp/.

Our director of product management, Jon Skiffington, was ready to meet the press at the recent Esri International User Conference in San Diego. Which was a good thing, because the press showed up in the form of Sanjay Gangal of GISCafé and Alexis Brumm of Point of Beginning (POB) Magazine.

First, here’s a video of Jon’s chat with Sanjay, in which he wastes no time dishing up a very accessible one-minute primer on our product line, and even talks a little about the upcoming release of a new version of our Express Server product.

Sanjay Gangal of GIS Café interviews Jon on the show floor.

And because it’s always good to get a second opinion, here’s Jon responding to questions posed by Alexis. She pitches them right over the plate (what makes the MrSID software so popular, which of our products have drawn the most interest and why, and how are software developments affecting the market?) and Jon smacks them all into the outfield. We thought he came pretty well prepared, and in fact listening to his answers made us realize afresh why it’s so cool to be able to say we’ve been a part of LizardTech’s 20-year (so far) history.

Jon talking with Alexis Brumm of Point of Beginning Magazine.

If you’re using the MrSID format you’re a part of that history, too. If you’re not, well…it’s not too late. LizardTech plans to be making a lot more history in the years to come, and you might find that our geospatial software products could make your workflow easier or save you time and money right now, today! Contact your local LizardTech representative to become a part of the epic saga.

John Warden, senior geospatial engineer at Thermopylae Sciences and Technology, won the iPad in our contest at the Esri User Conference in San Diego two and a half weeks ago. As part of our celebration this year of twenty years of MrSID as a technology and of LizardTech as a company, we had asked folks to write in telling us how they had benefited from or been supported by the MrSID format. Names were then randomly selected from among the entries.

Mr. Warden wrote:

“A few months after starting my job as the geospatial engineer for our company, the earthquake hit Haiti. We were involved in supporting relief efforts by creating a data sharing platform. Imagery was downloaded around the clock, some satellite imagery and some aerial imagery. One of the sets of aerial imagery had significant overlap and was in TIFF format, we had hundreds of gigabytes contained in thousands of files… until I ran it through my LizardTech software [GeoExpress], reducing the overall size to a few gigabytes of data in less than a dozen files.”

He says he plans to take his new iPad everywhere he goes, which will probably provoke jealousy in his plastic LizardTech lizard, which has to stay behind on top of his computer monitor.

Our two other winners, who each took away a $50 Amazon gift card, are Wayne Scribbins, geospatial coordinator for the City of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, and Paul Huppé, applications developer at the Data Management Division of Natural Resources Canada. You can read their testimony and that of others who wrote in to wish MrSID and LizardTech a happy twentieth anniversary here: http://www.lizardtech.com/anniversary/

Thanks to all who participated in our contest, and to all who have supported LizardTech over the past two decades.

The 2012 Esri International User Conference is coming up later this month and LizardTech will be there. We’re an Imagery sponsor of the conference, and you can find us at Booth #1317 in the Imagery Island. We’ll be busy, too:

• This year MrSID turns 20 years old, and we’re holding a contest where customers (like you!) give us a sentence or two (or a paragraph or two, or a page or two) about what MrSID has meant to you or your organization, how MrSID has come to your aid — saved your job or your marriage, that sort of thing – or just how MrSID has made doing your work easier. Details of this contest are here:
  http://www.lizardtech.com/anniversary/

• Jon Skiffington, our director of product management, will be giving a presentation about managing large imagery and LiDAR datasets in the Imagery Island Theatre on Tuesday, July 24 at 3 p.m.

• Our long-time friend and customer John Peterson of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Geospatial Unit in Albuquerque, New Mexico, will give a Lightning Talk about using LizardTech’s geospatial products as part of his organizations’ Enterpriese GIS Viewer workflow in SDCC, Room 28D on Tuesday, July 24 at 8:30 a.m. More information about that here:
  http://www.esri.com/industries/map-chart-dataproduction/imagery/imagery-uc.html

• You know Lizards are gregarious creatures, and we’ll have a booth at the Imagery Social on Wednesday, July 25 from 6 – 8 p.m in the Upper Level City Side Corridor. More information about that here:
  http://www.esri.com/imageryUC

We hope we’ll see you for some or all of these events. As always we’ll be showcasing our line of geospatial software products — GeoExpress for compressing and minipulating satellite and aerial imagery, Express Server for high-performance delivery and publication, and LiDAR Compressor for turning giant point cloud datasets into efficient MrSID files.

See you at the show!

If you’ve ever wondered about our Express Server product — what it is, what it does, how it works — relief has finally arrived. Not that you couldn’t always just call or email us and bat the subject around with a sales representative (you still can), but for those shy persons among you and those of you who like to do research before committing yourselves to conversation, you can now read all about Express Server image serving software in the quiet of your own browser.

GeoPlace.com has published a new LizardTech white paper titled “How Express Server Software Improves Geospatial Image Delivery”. It provides an overview of what Express Server does, describes how it fits into geospatial workflows, and then dives into some of Express Server’s more amazing features and how they work. We can feel your curiosity brimming over even from where we’re sitting.

• Do we describe the different caching strategies that enable Express Server to put pixels in front of users fast, whether or not the imagery is being used to satisfy WMS requests, or being reprojected upon delivery? We sure do.
• Do we explain how Express Server knows how to overlap one tile over another in a mosaic when an image’s transparency values get changed in compression? You bet!
• Do we show how JPIP-enabled clients can request image data to be streamed across low-bandwidth and even intermittent connections? Of course.

All this and more.

To download a copy, point your browser to http://www.geoplace.com/ME2/Default.asp and click the Download link in the White Papers section. (Note: after a while that link may change; if there’s no LizardTech white paper listed on that page when you go there, then click here: http://form.jotformpro.com/form/21633872862964)