Pacific Hydro, a global developer and operator of clean energy projects that include solar, geothermal, hydro and wind, has linked their ESRI GISystem with their Microsoft SharePoint document storage, spatially enabling the organisation’s documents.
Maja Barnett, GIS Co-ordinator at Pacific Hydro, estimates that over 95% of documents across the organisation have some sort of geospatial reference, citing this as the main reason for developing a system to spatially enable documents. The change will allow spatial relationships between documents to be viewed, and spatial information within documents able to be analysed from within the SharePoint interface
Previous to this, SharePoint documents could not be searched spatially or by individual asset. Instead, multiple documents for an individual asset or geographic location had to be searched for individually, often across different document libraries.
The first task was to open up the GIS data stored within geodatabases, and then provide a dynamic link to the mapping interface from within SharePoint.
To do this, the company is using Visual Fusion from IDV Solutions to link ESRI and SharePoint. The company used Melbourne-based IT company Geomatic Technologies to integrate the data sources, ensuring any updates to the GIS data are automatically reflected in the mapping interface available to SharePoint users.
Staff can now view the location of assets from within SharePoint, and in turn view additional information stored within the geodatabase.
The Visual Fusion solution deployed by GT on the SharePoint platform has provided the tools to effectively extend the mapping and visualisation of business data without the need for all users to be trained in GIS.
