How Cloudpoint Geospatial Supported Enhanced Indoor Routing at Austin Community College
- Tyler Severson
- Feb 25
- 2 min read
The Challenge: Overcoming the Infrastructure Barrier
Austin Community College (ACC) District manages 11 diverse campuses and millions of square feet of academic space. To support its students, the college's Facilities Information Systems (FIS) team sought to implement a campus-wide pedestrian navigation system using ArcGIS Indoors. Their vision is to provide a seamless "Blue Dot" experience, allowing students to see their real-time location on a digital map and generate turn-by-turn directions to classrooms, labs, and student services.
However, a significant technical hurdle stood in the way. The college primarily operates in an ArcGIS Online environment and does not currently maintain an internal ArcGIS Enterprise system. Because ArcGIS Online does not natively host the complex network analysis datasets required to calculate indoor pedestrian routes, ACC needed an ArcGIS Enterprise server without the high overhead of purchasing, hosting, and maintaining its own infrastructure.
The Solution: A Managed Service Partnership
To bridge this gap, ACC partnered with Cloudpoint Geospatial. As an experienced Esri Gold Partner, Cloudpoint provided the missing link by hosting ACC's network datasets within our own, secure ArcGIS Enterprise environment in Amazon Web Services (AWS). This approach allowed ACC to keep its primary data within ArcGIS Online while leveraging Cloudpoint's infrastructure for the heavy lifting of route calculation.
Under this model, ACC developed individual routing networks for each of its 11 campuses and shared them with our team. Cloudpoint then tested and published these as routing services, providing ACC with the REST URLs needed to enhance their web maps and mobile applications.
The Results: Precision Navigation and Accessibility
The collaboration resulted in a sophisticated wayfinding system that debuted for their Fall 2025 semester. At the massive 1.2 million-square-foot Highland Campus, students can now navigate within the building and levels using touchscreen kiosks and mobile devices. The system is specifically optimized for accessibility, allowing users to choose routes that use elevators and avoid stairs. By using Cloudpoint's hosted services, ACC successfully launched 12 web-based Indoor Viewer apps (one per campus, plus district-wide resources) and a mobile application that delivers real-time, high-accuracy positioning. Curious how these networks perform? You can explore the live Highland Campus Indoor Viewer, powered by Cloudpoint's hosted services, to test the turn-by-turn pedestrian routing yourself.
Scaling the Solution for Your Organization
Austin Community College proves that advanced indoor intelligence is accessible to any organization, regardless of its current GIS infrastructure. Whether you manage a university, a hospital, or a corporate headquarters, we can help you bring the 'Blue Dot" to your facility. Contact our team today to discuss how Cloudpoint Geospatial can host your indoor route networks and elevate your organization's spatial capabilities.
Check out ACC's Article about this project:
