Visual Fusion 4.5 Overview

Visual Fusion 4.5 ®

Overview
IDV’s Visual Fusion ® software unites
data visually, exposing hidden trends
and driving rapid insights that enable
better decisions.

Visual Fusion helpings organizations
turn the corner and gain understanding,
improve their bottom line, and
keep their people safe.

Let us show you how.

Visual Fusion is a trademark of IDV Solutions, LLC. Other marks referenced herein are the service
marks, trademarks, or registered trademarks of their respective manufacturers.
Visual Fusion is protected by U.S. Patent No. 7567262

VISUAL FUSION PRODUCT OVERVIEW

Visual Fusion (VF) from IDV Solutions is a geospatial mashup platform for creating interactive, map-
based applications utilizing the power of SharePoint.

VF allows everyone in the enterprise to build visual mashups combining Web feeds and enterprise data
with online maps, timelines, charts, graphs or other visualizations. It can be used to create a single
robust application, or multiple small-scale apps, each focused on a specific question or problem.

Key Capabilities: Key Benefits:
• CONNECT to virtually any data source • For the IT Admin: FLEXIBILITY &
within the enterprise or on the Web. AGILITY – Short development cycles
• VISUALIZE information in meaningful and applicability to just about any
context such as interactive maps, business problem makes VF the best
timelines, and charts. tool in the box.
• CREATE custom variables & hotspots • For the Knowledge Worker: INSIGHT
to alert users to important information. & PRODUCTIVITY – Spend less time
• PROVIDE permission-based publishing finding & compiling information and
and workflow integration so people more time in analysis & discovery.
have access to information and the • For the Business Decision Maker:
collaboration tools they need. PROFITABILITY – Extend the value of
• ENABLE contribution from individuals your investments in data & systems
in real time through SharePoint or and give your team a powerful tool that
mobile devices. anyone can use.

Organizations all over the world currently rely on VF to build apps for continuity planning, supply chain
management , retail analysis, crisis management, strategic planning, asset management and more. It
allows business leaders and knowledge workers to make more informed decisions in less time.

This overview describes what you can build with VF, how it integrates with Microsoft’s
SharePoint, and the key steps to building a Visual Fusion application or mashup.

© 2009 IDV Solutions, LLC PAGE 2

Visual Fusion is a trademark of IDV Solutions, LLC. Other marks referenced herein are the service marks, trademarks, or registered trademarks of their respective manufacturers.

WHAT YOU CAN BUILD WITH VF

With VF, the story within your business data can be told more fully and in less time. You can unite data
from disparate sources and make sophisticated use of icons, colors, and other visual elements to
communicate vital aspects of the data instantly.

In an application built with VF, users can access text displays, charts and graphs, video and audio,
and links to Web feeds. They can contribute to the view and quickly disseminate discoveries to peers.
As a result, business users understand their business scenario more quickly and clearly, and make
better informed decisions.

Visual Enterprise Mashups Visual Composite Applications
Power users can set up Visual Fusion mashups IT professionals can build robust VF applications
in a few hours or less. These are small-scale to illuminate on-going issues within an
projects, combining just a few data sources. For organization. Use VF applications to manage
example: business interests (assets, continuity, risk, supply
• Overlay sales performance data with chain, etc.) and analyze business information
demographics and competitor locations to (sales, marketing, consumer trends, etc.).
find underserved retail markets.
Enterprises are currently using VF to:
• Combine maps, news, and on-the-scene
• Bring together worldwide news feeds,
photos to create a common operational
building security logs, facilities maps, and
picture for an event or emergency.
video feeds in a system for monitoring assets
• Turn an excel spreadsheet of customers into a
and responding to incidents.
heat map to quickly show market penetration.
• Visualize factories, suppliers, products and
• Visualize point of sale data over both location
business relationships to proactively protect
and time to get a greater understanding of
supply chains.
which locations do better at what times.
• Support marketing strategists by filtering
• Mashups allow the enterprise or the business
and analyzing marketing data from multiple
unit to answer specific business questions
sources, internal and external to the
quickly, with little or no intervention from the
organization.
IT department.

The flexibility to build quick mashups and robust
applications on the same platform means VF can
serve multiple needs and users across the enterprise,
providing a significant return on investment.



VISUAL FUSION CORE TECHNOLOGIES

Visual Fusion Server (VFS) and Visual Fusion Experience (VFX) are the core technologies of Visual
Fusion. Although VFS and VFX are perfect complements to each other, either product can be
implemented independently or in concert with other technologies.

Visual Fusion Server (VFS)
Sitting in the middle of the technical architecture, VFS integrates data from a variety of sources,
standardizes the geographic and time-based aspects of data, and then makes all the content
accessible in a variety of industry standard formats (KML, GML, GeoRSS, etc.).

VFS includes a robust styling engine for formatting data, and two technologies that facilitate rapid
application development: VF App Hub and VF Composer. Using these, anyone can instantiate a new
mashup in minutes, and then add and style data to complete the application in a few hours or days.

Virtually Endless
any data source possibilities

External Cloud Data
News Web Services
& Alerts
Interactive
Visuals

Mapping

Enterprise
Applications Data Stores Timelines

Portal Mobile

Reporting



Visual Fusion Experience (VFX)
VFX delivers a flexible, highly-responsive
user experience, leveraging all the
strengths of Silverlight (and Flash in
VFX3).

Users can view and filter data, perform
in-depth analysis by viewing multiple data
feeds together, and add additional feeds
“on the fly.”

End users benefit from intuitive
interfaces, tools, controls, and visuals.
The end result is better, faster decision
making for the knowledge worker and
business leader.

Other VF Technologies:
• SpatialWiki – Create geographic points, lines or shapes by drawing on a map; then
edit, and share the content, or add it to VF mashups. SpatialWiki can be integrated
with VF mashups or serve as a standalone product.
• VF Enterprise Search - Search against any data source connected to VF:
SharePoint content, databases, or Web content. Turn your search into a data source
for VF mashups, and view up-to-date search results as a point layer on the map.
• VF Tile Server – Increase the performance of in-house imagery and integrate it with
other data in VF mashups.
• Data Connectors – Leverage both native connectors and an SDK that facilitates
connecting to virtually any data source.
• VF Mobile: Contribute – Turn users’ iPhones into real-time data creation tools.
Contribute is an add-on product for uploading mobile phone photos and comments
into SharePoint Libraries and VF mashups.



INTEGRATION WITH SHAREPOINT

Visual Fusion is deeply integrated with Microsoft’s SharePoint portal software; it uses SharePoint as
a repository for many types of content, and exploits the SharePoint architecture in multiple ways,
empowering you to:

Create and manage content Publish SharePoint data in
Users can collaborate and create a variety geospatial formats
of content through VF, while retaining all the VF renders List or Library data in industry
benefits of SharePoint content management, standard formats (KML, GML, or GeoRSS) for
including authorship, access, and versioning. use with VF or other client software.
Typically unmanaged content, such as KML
files, SHP files, and even links to cloud-based Maintain security
data, can be stored and managed in VF Lists VF leverages SharePoint to provide security
and Libraries. SharePoint “views” can be used trimming of data in VF mashups, so that groups
to filter and create different map layers from the of users can be allowed or blocked for each
same data. data feed.

Render SharePoint data mashup-ready Connect through the SharePoint Business
VF automatically fetches latitude and longitude Data Catalog
coordinates for SharePoint data, based on item VF has a native connector for the BDC. This
addresses or locations; you can manually refine means that any data source connected to
locations using an embedded Bing Maps map. SharePoint via the BDC can be easily connected
Converters are supplied for geotagging your to VF as well.
existing lists and libraries.
Rapidly develop applications in SharePoint
Geo-enable Excel files for mashups Rapidly initiate enterprise mashups using
Extending SharePoint’s Excel Services, VF SharePoint Workflow and site templates. VF App
stores your Excel files in a custom library and Hub and VF Composer are GUI tools that make
geo-tags each line item, so they can be used in this a no-code process. The SharePoint site-
geographic mashups. building capabilities mean that any number of
Visual Fusion applications can coexist within a
Geo-enable Enterprise Search SharePoint portal.
VF extends SharePoint Enterprise Search to
crawl and index SharePoint data, SQL Server Install and set up quickly
content, databases, BDC connected content, There are no system requirements other than
Web feeds, and more, and display search results those already in place to support MOSS 2007
on the map. installations. A typical rollout of VF involves
installing it on the Web Front End server(s), then
activating VF features.



ASSIMILATE CONTENT WITH VF

VF’s services-based approach to data assimilation lets you combine data from a multitude of sources
seamlessly in the same application.

SharePoint Lists & Libraries Connectors
VF uses SharePoint as a repository for many VF supplies built-in and add-on data connectors
types of content, including: for sources that include:
• tabular data • SQL Server
• spreadsheets • Oracle
• image files • MOSS Business Data Catalog (BDC)
• documents • Bing Maps for Enterprise Web Service
• calendars • MapPoint Web Service
• InfoPath forms • ESRI ArcSDE
• mobile device contributions • Excel files
• KML/KMZ, ATOM, GeoRSS and SHP files • Web feeds (KML/KMZ, ATOM, GeoRSS,
• Custom icons to be used in Visual Fusion WMS) & Shapefiles
applications
• links to Web feeds Additional custom connectors can be created
using a template in the VF SDK.
VF automatically geo-tags SharePoint content,
assigning latitude-longitude coordinates based Standards Support
on addresses or other location information VF supports the standards that have emerged
in the data. in the geospatial content arena, including KML/
KMZ, ATOM, GeoRSS, WMS, GML, SHP, and
WKB. The product can import data in numerous
formats, convert where necessary, and then
export in multiple formats, so you can use a
variety of map viewers with VF.



USE APP HUB TO BUILD APPLICATIONS IN MINUTES

VF App Hub is the directory and launch point for all mashups created with Visual Fusion; it’s also the
place to create a new application site in minutes. The App Hub leverages SharePoint workflow and site
templates; the app creator simply needs to fill out a short form, choose a template, and submit the
application for approval by a SharePoint administrator.

The use of templates
reduces app creation time
and expands possibilities.
In addition to the
templates supplied with VF,
administrators can create
custom templates that may
include pre-configured data
sources, a pre-populated
Feed Control, and other
customizations.

Once approved, a basic site
can be built in only a few
minutes, complete with the
VF user interface, data repository and
Composer. From that point on, the app
creator uses the Composer to arrange
and style data sources.



ADD & STYLE CONTENT WITH COMPOSER

The Composer enables users to create visual mashups without programming or database skills, and to
quickly update and transform these mashups as needed; it provides the agility that real-world business
scenarios demand.

This GUI tool automatically discovers and lists all content available from Visual Fusion data sources.
Just “drag and drop” from the list to pull data feeds into your application; then add labels, create feed
groups, and select visual styles for your feeds. Multiple levels of styling are available in the Composer:

Basic Styling
• Use the GUI to assign basic styling (colors,
icons, line widths, transparency) to feeds.
• Select the zoom levels at which the feed will
be visible.
• Determine whether the feed is automatically
“on” whenever the mashup starts up .

Advanced Styling
• Apply conditional styling, to show different
icons or shading based on values in the data
and rules that incorporate your business
logic. For example, add color to areas based
on population, sales revenue, or other data
attribute.
• Create a buffer polygon around a data element
to visualize a protected zone or a zone of
influence.
• Use buffers to communicate important aspects
of the data, by making buffer sizes vary based
on a data attribute like revenue or population.
• Increase performance for point layers by
clustering groups of close or overlapping
points into a single icon when the map viewer
is zoomed out.
• Increase performance for shape layers by
smoothing line and polygon edge when the
map viewer is zoomed out.



Heat Map Styling
• Choose one of many color themes to apply to
the frequency heat map
• Choose a radius size for each point of heat;
choose from presets or enter a custom value
• Choose an intensity level for each point of
heat
• Tie intensity level to an underlying value,
creating a weighted heat map where certain
points contribute more heat than others

Additional Capabilities
IT professionals can access configuration
options beyond those in the Composer, through
configuration files. Advanced features include:
• additional configuration options for the spatial
operations
• custom procedures
• complex nested styling rules
• transformation on data created with North
American-centric tools

Deeper levels of information
In addition to the data on your map and timeline, you can connect end users with more
information and deeper levels of detail, including text panels, audio, video, images, and links to
external content.

Tooltips and details panels for presenting this content can be created using HTML and
implemented entirely through configuration.

You can store the detail content and formatting within SharePoint, where it automatically becomes
part of your application, or bring in content from other sources and incorporate it through
configuration files.



USING APIS AND SDKS TO EXTEND VF & INTEGRATE OTHER ELEMENTS

While a VF application can be extensively customized through configuration, a set of developer tools
and tutorials is included to extend VF with custom code. Using these, developers can immediately
start building on top of the VF platform. Using the SDK, they can:
• Add custom data
connectors, data filters
and transformations to the
back-end
• Add custom tools, controls,
and Silverlight components
to the front-end
• Incorporate third-party
client software
• Integrate custom charts,
graphs, or tables
• Apply localization to VF to
serve non-English speaking
communities

VF lets you foster integration
with whatever data sources,
processes, components, or
Web Parts will benefit your
business the most.



GAIN INSIGHT & PRODUCTIVITY WITH VISUAL FUSION EXPERIENCE

The VFX user interface empowers users to interact with content like no other product in the market.
VF performance is rapid, not the click-and-wait commonly associated with traditional geospatial
products, and the interface provides powerful, intuitive tools for working with your data.

Navigation tools
• The Pilot is an intuitive, graphical tool for
ROTATE TILT
zooming, rotating, and tilting the map. Tilting
works especially well with vertically extruded
points to emphasize important numerical
values in the data. [visual]
• The fly to option lets the end user enter a
place name or address and have the map
auto-navigate to that location. You can set FLY TO
up custom hash tables to provide quick
navigation to enterprise locations based on ID
numbers, facility names, and the like.

MapTools
• latitude/longitude sensor and grid
• scale bar Lat Long Lat Long Scale Bar
Sensor Grid
• ruler tool (measure distances)
• full screen mode
• snap shot (save an image of the map view)
Ruler Full Screen Snap Shot

Tools for each data feed
• The opacity slider (fade a feed to make it less
dominant in the visualization) FEED ACTIONS

• Button controls to refresh the data, expand
the view to the extents of the data set, or
launch a “more information” link.



Data Filters
For each feed, application creators can
configure data filters that use timelines, radio
buttons, checkboxes or sliders. Giving this
powerful filtering capability to the end user
relieves the site creator of having to anticipate
exactly how users need to slice and dice the
data. Instead, creators build in flexibility that
allows end users to filter the view according to
their own needs.

Spatial Query Tools
When the spatial query tools are enabled,
the end user can select an area by drawing
Rectangle Radius Polygon
on the map; the site creator uses the SDK to Query Query Query
determine what the app will do with
the content in the selected area, such
as populate a datagrid component,
an Excel file, a chart or graph, or
perhaps an email.



Add feeds to the view on the fly
VFX not only presents the data that the app creator assumed would be useful, but also provides two
ways for the end user to add to the dataset:

• Create feeds through search. Users can search
against any configured search engine, such
as VF Enterprise Search, Bing local search,
Wikipedia, MapPoint, Flickr, and so on. VF
Enterprise Search searches all connected
content- databases, SharePoint, Web feeds and
more-and returns the results as a new feed on
the map. Wikipedia and MapPoint searches are
enabled out of the box. For Wikipedia, an article
link is automatically enabled for each point
returned.
• Add Web feeds. Many valuable sources of data
are available via Web feeds, and VFX makes
capitalizing on these as simple as copy, paste,
and click. VFX supports inclusion of feeds in
the most widely used geospatial formats: KML,
KMZ, ATOM, GeoRSS, and WMS.

A custom experience without custom programming
Through configuration (not coding), application creators can enable extensive customization:
• Modify the look and feel of the user interface
• Add new base maps
• Enable and disable tools
• Add custom icons or extruded points
• Embed video, images, or links to other content sources in the VFX details panel to provide a rich
user experience.



CONCLUSION

Visual Fusion empowers information workers
and decision makers by letting them
view disparate enterprise and cloud data
holistically within a Web portal.

Visual Fusion has won critical acclaim for
benefiting organizations in three key areas:
• Shorter time to deployment means
your mission-critical app is typically
deployed in days or weeks, not months
or years, and the organization can quickly
begin solving the problem or gaining new
insight on an issue.
• Powerful, intuitive user experience Empowering the Insightful Enterprise TM

benefits users at every level of expertise.
Applications built on Visual Fusion help IDV Solutions, a Microsoft Gold

people do their jobs more effectively Certified Partner, is a software

and efficiently. company specializing in enterprise

• Deep SharePoint integration makes mashups.

implementation and adoption a snap.
Being inside the portal provides IDV assists Global 2000 and

enterprise-wide accessibility, security, government organizations in making

and content management advantages. their information more accessible,

No other mashup product or geospatial understandable, and contextual.

product takes advantage of SharePoint
the way Visual Fusion does.
FOR MORE INFORMATION

Visual Fusion is an opportunity for the IDV Solutions®
enterprise to enhance existing resources 5913 Executive Dr, Suite 320
with tools that provide immediate and Lansing, MI 48911
meaningful results.

For more information contact us today!

Visual Fusion is a trademark of IDV Solutions, LLC. Other marks referenced herein are the service marks, trademarks, or registered trademarks of their respective
manufacturers. Visual Fusion is protected by U.S. Patent No. 7567262

Visual Fusion 4.5 Overview

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