Distributor: Environmental Systems Research Institute (Redlands, CA)
Price:$49.99
System Requirements
Pentium or higher CPU
64MB of RAM
VGA or higher resolution video card and monitor
800MB of available hard-disk space
Window 95, 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000 or higher
Features
BusinessMAP Travel Edition (TE) comes with the following functionality:
- The ability to geocode their customer location databases.
- Automatically converts address records from contact managers, databases and spreadsheets like ACT!, GoldMine, Outlook, and Excel to plot points on the map and return query results.
- Driving directions to a customer or prospect’s location.
- Perform Traveling Salesman Solutions by locating customers and prospects in an area and setting appointments by location to maximize time and travel using optimized routing.
- Query Dun & Bradstreet’s 11 million businesses by 8 digit SIC code to locate potential customers and competitors.
- Directing customers to the closest doctor, service center, retail store, or other important business location
- Plan targeted marketing campaigns by identifying prospects in a given geographic region by ZIP Code, county, congressional district, and so on.
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Installation
ESRI’s version of BusinessMAP Travel Edition 1.0 is a scaled down version
of it BusinessMAP software product. The product comes with 3 CD’s: a Program
Installation CD, Streets CD, and Business Listings CD. During the installation
process, the user is asked if they want a Typical installation which installs
all software components and data to the hard drive (1400 Mb), or a CD-Rom
installation which runs the Streets and Routing components from the CD
(850 Mb). I installed the Typical installation which took several minutes
on my PC and I had to change CD’s during the process.
After the program installation is complete, the software sets up a Contact Manager link for the user with links to Excel, Access, Outlook, ACT! and Goldmine. The Contact Manager allows a user to launch BusinessMAP TE directly from the another software application. The Contact Manager automatically added a button to my Outlook GUI to launch BusinessMAP and I needed to setup an Excel Add-In (from the Tools menu) for the button to be added to the Excel GUI.
Program
There are three templates a user can choose for a new map: Travel template,
USA template, or a blank map. The Travel template of BusinessMAP TE has
five windows when the program opens up: Map, Layer, Database, Routing,
and What’s Nearby windows. The USA template opens up with only three window:
Map, Layers and Database windows. Each window can be minimized, maximized
or closed by clicking the buttons in the upper left of trhe window. The
window can be easily opened again by checking the appropriate menu under
the Window menu. The active window will have its title in blue with all
the inactive titles in gray. The windows can be docked or undocked based
on the user’s preferences.
Finding Locations
The Map Window starts with a scale to the entire United States with
Alaska and Hawaii when using the USA or Travel templates. The user can
zoom in and out using the standard tools on the tool bar or can zoom into
specific geographic levels like state, county, street using a drop down
menu on the toolbar. There is also a Find menu which allows the user to
search for specific counties, states, addresses, intersections, etc. Locations
that are searched for are then saved under the Database – Locations window
and can be retrieved by double-clicking on the record.
Geocoding
BusinessMAP TE can read customer addresses can be stored in Excel files,
Access databases, text files, dBase files, Paradox files and Excel files.
I used an Excel file to geocode that had 65 customer addresses in New York.
After selecting the files, I was taken through a set of wizards that asked
me how I wanted to geocode the data and the fields that would be used to
perform the geocoding. Since the number of records was pretty small, the
geocoding process took under 30 seconds to geocode 65 records, of which
58 were matched correctly. Records that did not match can be accessed through
the Database menu by selecting Unassigned Records. The records that were
not geocoded were highlighted in Yellow in the Database window. I wanted
to edit the records of the data that did not match but I was not able to
find a way to change edit the records in the Database Window.
Routing
Routing in BusinessMAP TE can be achieved through three methods:
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a) Entering the location – Use the Add Stop(s) by Location command to bring up a dialog box (like the find location dialog box) with tabs for entering an address, intersection, postal code, city, etc. and enter the appropriate information on the selected tab.
b) Adding the stop from the database window – After selecting records in the database window, use the Add Stop(s) from the Database command to add one or more selected stops to the route.
c) Selecting locations from the map – Use the Pick Stop(s) by Mouse command to add stops using the mouse and the map view.
After you have entered the stops, you can choose to Find Route for 3 stops or less or choose Find Optimized Route for 4 stops or more.
I chose to Add stops from the Database Window. The stops were added in the order of the selected records in the table. The first stop was denoted as the first record in the table and the last stop was the last record in the table. Users can add stops in specific order by finding selecting stops only certain stops in the database window in the order they would like to plan their route. The routing for the 58 stops from my New York customers table took approximately one minute to compute the optimized route. The map shows the route in green and the directions are in the Routing Window under the Directions tab.
What’s Nearby
The “What's Nearby” feature can be used to find business locations,
contacts, or map features within a given radius of a specified location.
The user has to specify a target location similar to the Find Locations
mentioned earlier. The user also has to specify a radius to search for
features within a given distance from that location. One thing to note
is if a user sets a location to a polygon feature such as a zip code or
county, the radius will be drawn from the centroid of the polygon feature,
not a buffer of the entire polygon.
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After the target location and radius are set, the map will zoom to the location and will draw a circle around the location. The “What’s Nearby” window will then be populated with the Business listing that fall within the radius by category. The category headings include Cinemas, Hotel/Motel, Restaurants, etc. Users can press the + or – boxes next to the categories to expand or contract the individual businesses that fall within each category. Another feature you can right click on any business and get routing information and directions to or from the target location automatically.
Business Listings
You can add specific business listing as a layer to the map by querying
the Dunn & Bradstreet database of over 11 million businesses. You can
query this database by selecting Business Listings under the Find menu.
A window will open that allows you to enter specific criteria about the
business you are trying to find: business name, location, type of business,
size of business and corporate information. Once you have entered the search
criteria, BusinessMAP TE generates a new layer and adds it to the Layer
window.
The output of the search criteria was a little confusing. I did a search for hotels in Philadelphia and BusinessMAP TE added a layer to the Layer window called “Philadelphia Hotels” as I named it but there were no hotels displayed on the map. To change the display of the layer, the user must choose the Edit Layer (Advanced) menu item under the Layer menu. I was then able to specify a zoom level for the hotels layer among several zoom levels: city, county, multicounty, state, etc. However, the zoom level also included other businesses that I had not selected like restaurants, hospitals, and banks. As I zoomed in closer, all these features appeared on the map when my query was for only hotels.
Additional Functionality
BusinessMAP TE has most of the common GIS functionality built into
the product. The user can Zoom in and out and to the previous extent. There
is an ID Tool, Text Tool, Label Tool and Measure Distance Tool. The user
can do Find by Circle, Find by Polygon and Find by Rectangle for information
in any of the layers. The result of the Find will be posted in the Database
window.
BusinessMAP TE comes with a wide array of data for the United States only. It does include an option for users to add ESRI Shapefiles to the map, for example a person could add Canadian provinces to the map to improve the map display. If you do open a Shapefile, BusinessMAP TE allows you to change the projection in the Map window to Equidistant Cylindrical Projection, Robinson Projection, or Albers Equal-Area Conic Projection (which is the default projection of all BusinessMAP maps).
Output from BusinessMAP is in the form of a predetermined Layout of the Map window. The user can add things like a title or scale bar from the View menu or change the format of the layout with options in the Print dialog box. BusinessMAP TE can export maps and/or driving directions to Palm OS PDA. Use the File, Save to Palm command to create a file for transfer to a Palm device the next time the user syncs with their PC. Users can save maps and/or driving directions as a webpage to post on their websites. Users can also save maps as Windows Bitmaps, Encapsulated PostScript, Gif’s, JPEG’s, PC graphics format, Portable Network Graphics, Truevision, Targa, and TIFF’s.
Conclusion
BusinessMAP TE packs a lot of functionality and data into the product.
The product functions very quickly on a desktop for operations like routing
and geocoding. The product was designed with the specific functionality
listed above. ESRI recommends that users should upgrade to BusinessMAP
3.0 for territory design and thematic mapping capabiltities for demographic
analysis.