What Map Business Online Did on Its Summer Vacation

Map Business Online has released several new features over the summer that some of you may be very interested in. We don’t say a lot about new features over the summer months because so many people are on reduced schedules.

During August we released our Act! Contact management integration.  Act! Users can now upgrade to Map Business Online Act! support through the Act! Market place (coming soon) and through an Map Business Online patch available through Map Business Online.

Act! Users will be able to select contacts in Act! And export them to Map Business Online for routing or list segmentation and campaign development. Plus the Act! world now has access to the best geo-market analysis and sales territory management tools available at this price point.

And for Salesforce.com users we’ve got you covered.  Just got to Salesforce.com AppExchange and migrate your Map Business Online subscription to a Salesforce version.  It’s at no charge for existing subscribers.

Additionally, general Map Business Online users have now got some new tools to play with:

  • Summarize your data – You may have read about the summarize option available by Color Coding Points, but you may not be aware that you can now create summarized data reports by radius, drive time or polygon areas. Look for the Summary tool (a stretched capital E) associated with your shape’s mini-tool bar . Click it and enjoy the import options. They include your imported data, demographic data, and calculated datasets you’ve compiled. Export to Excel for use outside the application. Or look for the Add to Map feature in Summarize and place a label on your map describing your data.
  • Imagery & Streets – Sometimes you just have to compare real street aerial imagery to the vector street layer that map providers commonly use.  Well now Map Business Online let’s you do just that. Select the option Imagery and Streets in the Map & Data view drop down. You’ll see street vectors with labeling over aerial imagery at all zoom levels. It’s like Google but without all the ads and the crazy UI.
  • Market Analysis – Comparing two datasets has been a cool feature of Map Business Online for a few years now but now you’ll be able to do more. For instance, let’s say you have a list of properties or businesses and you want to know the approximate population value within a radius of miles of each location. You can now run that query which can add up to three demographic category results to your imported data layer. You could run a similar query to add data columns that total by the location’s county, zip code or state as well.
  • Sales Territory Mapping Fill – Some users like to show their sales territories completely color coded with no blank areas for non-zip code sections of the USA.  We’ve added a preference setting under the zip codes folder in Map & Data. Here you can choose to set your zip codes to “USPS Zip codes with fillers.”  This means if you create a territory in Utah or Nevada with this setting turned on, any national parks will show a color code that matches surrounding territory zips.
  • Area of Interest Square Mile Measure – We’ve added an area square mile measurement to the Demographic Data listing – go all the way to the bottom to find it.  You can add this function to your territory maps, market areas of interest, any area that is based on map layers like zip codes or counties.  Using this area measure tool you can add square mile or kilometer totals to your market analysis.
  •  Circle & Drive Time Search – You should also notice, when you conduct a search of an area by radius search or drive time polygon creation there is now an option at the bottom of the save dialog to search for the nearest “X” quantity of locations.  This qualifier will let you immediately limit your search to a certain number of records. For example, a drive time search of a hospital could provide a drive time polygon of 20 minutes and a list of the five closest emergency rooms.

There are a bunch of smaller enhancements, little things that make the Map Business Online a little easier to use, or a little more useful to typical Map Business Online business map users. Software enhancements are always a combination of little improvements and bigger new features.  We depend on user feedback to understand what the product needs most to make it the best business mapping tool available anywhere.

Find out why over 25,000 business users log into MapBusinessOnline.com

Contact: Geoffrey Ives geoffives@spatialteq.com (800) 425-9035, (207) 939-6866

MapPoint users – please consider www.MapBusinessOnline.com as your MapPoint Replacement.

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About Geoffrey Ives

Geoffrey Ives lives and works in southwestern Maine. He grew up in Rockport, MA and graduated from Colby College. Located in Maine since 1986, Geoff joined DeLorme Publishing in the late 1990's and has since logged twenty-five years in the geospatial software industry. In addition to business mapping, he enjoys playing classical & jazz piano, gardening, and taking walks in the Maine mountains with his Yorkshire Terrier named Skye.
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