Recently Joe traveled over 3,500 miles from Central Illinois to San Diego and back to attend the Esri User Conference. This was Joe's first UC and it was a great, albeit sometimes overwhelming, time! Joe was able to learn about the latest GIS services available from Esri, as well as connect with colleagues from around the globe. It was truly a worldwide conference, and he was able to connect with people from the US, England, Canada, Sweden, Chile, Russian, and many more count

Have you ever wondered what drones can do for you? In this post, we will take a look at some ideas on how your organization can save time and money with drone mapping. The hype is over and now drone technology is making its way into today's mainstream technical workflows. Now its time to take a good look at the return on investment to see if it all adds up. Below are few examples of how drones are helping people in their everyday jobs to make them easier and more efficien

Over the past 3 months, Cloudpoint staff has been hard at work covering the hundreds of miles of paved roads that make up the Macon County Highway SignOps inventory. The primary team of Joe, Paul, Tyler, and Ken (our new intern!), inventoried and barcoded 7,218 signs, which involved logging assembly location, assembly type, sign type (with MUTCD code), sheeting type, manufacture date, install date, sign text, and noting any damage to the sign. At the beginning of this projec

Congratulations to Paul Stephenson and Matt Junker of Cloudpoint Geographics for receiving their ArcGIS Desktop Associate 10.5 certification. This certificate is obtained by completing one of Esri's technical examinations which tests candidates experience applying ArcGIS concepts and processes to workflows. Candidates must have two or more years of experience to be eligible for the award. Paul and Matt have both displayed their proficient abilities in utilizing GIS softw

Earlier this week, Joe made a trip to the Chula Vista Resort in Wisconsin Dells, WI for the Wisconsin County Highway Association Summer Road School. The association hosts two road schools a year, one in the Summer and one in the Winter. These events allow County Highway Commissioners and County Highway Board Supervisors to get together to learn what issues are facing the state of Wisconsin, as well as learn about new solutions to existing issues. Joe was able to meet with sev

Jonathan and Joe have been traveling like it's the holidays lately. What's been keeping them busy is a combination of field work in Macon County, IL for a SignOps implementation and various parcel fabric projects. But here at Cloudpoint we love to get out and meet different GIS users and talk about solutions for problems and projects that they are undertaking. Over the past 8 days, Cloudpoint has traveled over 450 miles and been to two different American Public Works Associat

Cloudpoint is excited to announce that we have partnered with DTS and Farnsworth Group for a pavement rating project for the City of Peoria! This project is quite extensive and entails driving every mile of City maintained roadways in a van equipped with laser scanning that collects and inventories every minute detail of the road. Once all the data is collected, the City will have a highly detailed record and rating for all of their roads. This data will be used for planning

With the number of field work projects increasing, and being well past the 200,000 mile mark on the current Honda Odyssey work van (Also known as Homer - get it? Because Homer wrote the Odyssey) we realized that we were going to be in the market for a new work vehicle. Well the stars aligned and the clouds parted, revealing a gorgeous "Cloudpoint blue" Dodge Caravan that was meant to be ours! Since expanding our fleet we are able to get field work done faster with two crews,

Cloudpoint Geographics is excited to announce another UAV drone mapping project that is in the works. We will be collecting data at Cog Hill Golf Course in Lemont, IL. Some of you golfers out there are familiar with Cog Hill, but for you other folks, Cog Hill is comprised of 4 separate courses and has hosted numerous Professional Golf Association events including 16 Western Opens and 4 BMW Championships. We will be collecting ground control points and high resolution imagery

Ashland County, WI has a beautiful setting along the southern shore of Lake Superior and is host to numerous northwoods activities. The County recently decided to upgrade its cadastral GIS layers to take advantage of Esri's newest tools including the parcel fabric. To accomplish this they choose Cloudpoint Geographics to provide professional services involving migrating their data into the parcel fabric within the ArcGIS environment. In addition, Cloudpoint will help the C

Tim has been with the City of Rochelle Street Department for 14 years. He started out as an operator in 2003 and in 2013 he became the Streets and Cemetery Superintendent. As Superintendent, Tim’s responsibilities include: maintenance and repair of all city streets, alleys, sidewalks, and parking lots; inspection, repair, and replacement of the city storm water system; maintaining all traffic control devices to MUTCD standards; managing the city forestry program; snow and ice

Cloudpoint is excited to announce that we have been hired by Track Planning Associates to complete a drone mapping flight for a proposed drag strip outside of Eau Claire, WI. This project is being done to gather survey data about the land surrounding an existing drag strip. When completed, the updated facility will have seating for 4,000 people and be home to several regional and national events! We are thrilled to be a part of this process and we can't wait to see the final

Macon County, IL is home to several gems, Millikin Univeristy, the original home of the Chicago Bears (Decatur Staleys), and of course, the Macon County Highway Department. Recently Macon County started inquiring about different solutions to manage their existing sign inventory. After meeting with Jon Hodel and Joe Christian a few times and getting an in depth demo of SignOps, Cloudpoint's in-house developed, web-based, sign inventory solution, County Engineer Bruce Bird kne

Cloudpoint is excited to announce that we have partnered with Scott County, Iowa to install ArcGIS Server on the Amazon Cloud. This will allow the County to have greater control over their mapping and make their maps available to more people on the web. The Amazon EC2 cloud is a flexible deployment solution that is versatile and scalable. Scott county staff will have complete control over what, when and how their public facing GIS is updated. this allows more efficient use o

Cloudpoint Geographics is excited to announce that we have been contracted by the City of Barrie, Ontario, Canada to assist with their Parcel Fabric! This project has been in the works for a few months and we a pleased to see all the pieces come together. In the coming year, Jon will be making a couple of trips to the great white north to assist in implementation and training of key staff to utilize Esri's Parcel Fabric. The Cloudpoint team is thrilled to add the City of B

This past Friday dozens of city and county officials converged on the Morton Fire Department building in Morton, IL for Cloudpoint Geographics' ArcGIS for Local Government Solutions Showcase. It was a successful event that included several presentations ranging on topics including drone mapping, parcel management, webmap creation, and much more. You can learn more about the topics discussed as well as access the presentations by accessing the Showcases page HERE . We are ha

The City of Washington, Illinois has experienced a population growth and a spur in construction over the past few decades. After meeting with Cloudpoint Geographics early this year, they decided that they needed to get the most out of their GIS in order to be ready for future growth. Washington decided that the best way for them to prepare for the future was to properly document all of their spatial data. Whether it was parcel data, utilities, zoning, or any other section of

One thing we love about working at Cloudpoint Geographics is the ability to spread the good word of GIS and how powerful of a tool it can be for an organization. Over the past few weeks several Cloudpoint staff members have had a variety of speaking engagements ranging in topics from mobile mapping implementation, to overhauling utility mapping, to a general overview of what GIS is, and why updating maps is important. This was true for both Jonathan and Joe as they hit the r

Every Fall the Illinois GIS Association hosts its annual conference. This year the event was at the Hilton Lisle/Naperville Hotel and Conference center from October 17-19. It was a fantastic event which started with the Monday night social which was sponsored by Cloudpoint Geographics and featured a rousing game of Trivia. Cloudpoint's own Micah Williamson was on the winning team while Joe, Paul, and Matt were all runners up falling 1 point shy of tying Micah. In addition t

One thing setting SignOps apart from the rest of the crowd is the user-derived environment. The development team has former highway maintenance experience and the users are solicited for their feedback frequently. Well, you spoke and we listened! Cloudpoint is happy to announce that we have launched our updated SignOps release! After compiling ideas for a few months, Cloudpoint was able to get some of your suggestions put in place. So what updates are included: The program