Call for InstantAtlas customers to rate the support service

Recently Dorothy from the InstantAtlas Support Team posted on the subject of feature requests for our products. This generated some great feedback. Many thanks to those who contributed their ideas.

Now I would also like to tap into your valuable feedback. We are always looking for ways to improve InstantAtlas support and to ensure this satisfies the needs of our customers. InstantAtlas customers only please vote below on InstantAtlas support. If you wish to provide any additional comments feel free to use the blog or to write to support@geowise.co.uk.

Many thanks,

Pierre Jenkins, Head of Support

Supporting InstantAtlas around the world

InstantAtlas is used world-wide and the number of customers outside the UK is large and rapidly increasing. This is principally due to the InstantAtlas outputs being entirely language-independent and the desktop authoring tools coming equipped with English, French, German and Spanish interface language packs. Also, our main website http://www.instantatlas.com can be viewed in any of those four languages. The need to extract meaning from numerical or text-based data has no geographic or cultural boundaries and creating data visualization software to empower only local users would be missing a trick.

In the age of web conferencing you would be forgiven for thinking that providing support for this far-flung customer base should not pose too great a challenge. This is to some extent true – we are particularly fond of the WebEx web conferencing tool that allows us to deliver demos, support and training to remote areas that we could not travel to quickly or inexpensively.

However, there remains an obstacle for which technology has a tendency to be disappointingly ineffectual – language. Believe me when I say that Google’s translation tools will only get you so far.

We provide support mainly by phone and email/chat. Many of our overseas customers have English as a mother tongue or have learnt it to a high level – we can relax and allow their exotic accent to transport us to far-away places. Others only have the basics they picked up at school and this makes technical troubleshooting interesting to say the least. Others have no English at all. With that in mind, we have always viewed foreign languages as a big plus and our support team currently includes native speakers of English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese and Ghetto-Texan (err, that’s an official language is it Dorothy?).

A global and multilingual customer base makes for interesting support work. On Monday we’ll discuss how to map a dengue fever outbreak with Argentina’s Ministry of Health, on Tuesday we’ll plan the delivery of a child health census with analysts at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital and on Wednesday we’ll work on the design of a community information system with the research team at Pinellas County in Florida… by Friday we’ll have called all seven continents. It brings us into contact with a wide range of data, issues, work methods and mind-sets and challenges us to find the best solutions. Occasionally we even have the pleasure of dropping in on these customers to deliver consultancy or training in person.

Look out for this week’s stories about our customers NISRA in Northern Ireland and The National Institute for Health and Welfare in Finland.

Till next time | A la prochaine | Hasta luego | Bis zum nächsten Mal | Tot de volgende keer | Até à próxima

Pierre Jenkins, Head of InstantAtlas Support

Versión en español

Supporting Somerset’s Partnership Intelligence Unit

Supporting InstantAtlas takes us into lots of different areas such as customer training, software testing and technical documentation. Probably the most rewarding part of the job, however, is being instrumental in a customer’s successful InstantAtlas solution. This might simply be through troubleshooting an installation problem or by giving advice on where to download suitable map data. But often we are commissioned to play a more substantial role and actually deliver part of or sometimes even the whole working solution.

This work can be very varied. For example, we might be asked to manipulate a customer’s raw statistical indicators into a suitable InstantAtlas format in Excel or asked to create a personalised design for a dynamic report.  Above all it requires good communication between the support team and the customer and careful planning from the outset. The support team draw on their in-depth knowledge of the InstantAtlas product but also on their experience in areas as diverse as data visualisation, web design, statistics, digital cartography, accessibility, IT infrastructure and even security. The aim is to combine the best ideas of both the support team and customer to deliver an InstantAtlas solution that best meets the end users’ requirements.

Local & Community Information Systems based on our InstantAtlas Server product present the greatest challenge due to the depth of the product and endless configuration possibilities. On the blog last week we featured INFORM Somerset, a web site that provides an overview to the county of Somerset (UK) on a range of themes. The initial setup of this site was a collaborative effort between Mike Smith’s Partnership Intelligence Unit (PIU) team based at Somerset Council and our support team, with the work ranging from data loading to user interface customisation. The highly pragmatic approach taken by Mike’s team made them a joy to work with and allowed for rapid turnaround times. With local & community information systems, which are built to hold lots of data, it can be tempting to go for “quantity over quality” where voluminous datasets are loaded with scant attention paid to how these are consumed by the end user. With INFORM Somerset a phased approach has been taken to ensure that data and viewing options are added in a controlled matter and always with the end user in mind. The thematic icons on the homepage take the user to dynamic lists of data views and profiles (Mike’s team simplified these terms to Information by Topic and Information by Area) – these do not come “out-of-the-box” but it was decided that this relatively-straightforward customisation would give users an easier route into the data.

Read the full story on INFORM Somerset and link to the site – it features a feedback link at the bottom of the page if you wish to leave your comments!

Pierre Jenkins, Head of InstantAtlas Support

6.5.0: A feature-packed new version of InstantAtlas Desktop

Hi! This is the first support team contribution to the InstantAtlas blog and I hope that our posts will provide a useful and perhaps alternative perspective on our products. Supporting InstantAtlas is never dull; the tools are constantly evolving and our customers continue to push boundaries and apply the software in innovative ways to display geo-statistical data.

There are so many topics to blog about but I would like to kick things off with a reminder to download the latest version of InstantAtlas Desktop, which was released Monday 9^th April.  The support team invest a great deal of time and effort in each and every release and we feel 6.5.0 is a winner!

This release is feature-packed; it contains a brand new template (the Double Base Layer template), several new components (Pyramid Chart, Google Search, Dot Plot) and a raft of other enhancements (GeoRSS contextual layers, custom point icons, dynamic table columns, etc). You can read more here:

http://www.instantatlas.com/downloads/IAD650ReleaseNotes.pdf

I am confident that version 6.5.0 will allow users to continue to break new ground in the exploration and presentation of their geo-statistical data. Please get hold of the new version and let us know what you think!

Pierre Jenkins, Head of InstantAtlas Support