Microsoft Launches Single View Platform

For those of us who have chosen the Microsoft platform, the good news is that we have many products from which to choose. Microsoft has an array of server and client products, as well as online services, that cover everything from collaboration to commerce, business intelligence to geographical information systems, personal productivity to accounting.

Sometimes the sheer number of choices can be daunting, so Microsoft is initiating new offerings that help us weave the various products into cohesive solutions. The goal is to bridge the gaps between product groups and provide additional documentation and code to integrate multiple Microsoft products.

The most recent release for government customers is the Microsoft Single View Platform (SVP). This helps you put information into geographic context. It provides:

Data visualization

Real-time or near real-time data links

Integration data from multiple, disparate sources

Access controls

Interoperability with other systems

The heart of SVP is integration of line of business and business intelligence systems with Microsoft Virtual Earth. This means you can show the geographical distribution of contagious disease cases, for instance, or traffic bottlenecks on your roads and highways.

You can get a better idea of what SVP is all about from the download section, particularly the white paper and the CRM datasheet. Here is a screenshot from a solution that Information Strategies developed with SVP:

I expect that Microsoft will add more products to SVP in the future, and that multi-product initiatives like SVP will be more common at Microsoft in the future.

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