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Foreword
This Guide to What's New in MapPoint 2004 was published in late 2003, just after MapPoint 2004 was released. In the next year and a
half, we sold many copies and it is now being provided in it's entirety for TechTrax readers.
The Guide is not a user's manual nor a tutorial for the software, but the intention was merely to explore and highlight differences
between MapPoint 2002 and MapPoint 2004. The Microsoft geography products including MapPoint are interesting in that Microsoft
renegotiates and may or may not renew with particular data vendors who supply the street, cartographic, demographics and other data
used in the products - or Microsoft may use alternate suppliers. Thus, there's no guarantee that the latest version is necessarily
better for your purposes, and this is one of the items explored throughout the document. Also, although there were not that many new
features in the MapPoint 2004 software, the Guide also covers these in some depth.
When the next version of MapPoint comes out, we again plan on writing an independent Guide to What's New in that version and if you
are a MapPoint user, I'd encourage you to check it out.
Eric Frost
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Introduction
It has been more than two years since Microsoft last released a desktop version of MapPoint and MapPoint 2004 has been much anticipated, both for the updated street and other data and to see what new features Microsoft would work into the product. Many people had been expecting a release last year (i.e., a MapPoint 2003) given that previously the product had been released annually.
The MapPoint team has been busy with the launch last year of MapPoint Web Services attracting and supporting enterprise customers and their move into the mobile devices space, as well as certainly the acquisition of Vicinity Corp. This probably accounts for the decision not to release a version last year and may explain why MapPoint 2004 is not the dramatic evolution in terms of functionality and capability that MapPoint 2002 had been.
While this may be a relief to makers of desktop mapping software companies and other MapPoint competitors, it's also an opportunity for third-party developers of add-ins to provide additional functionality Microsoft has not.
In any case, let’s take a look at what is new and updated in MapPoint 2004.
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Installation
The default options for installation have changed. With
MapPoint 2002, the installation wizard performed a Standard
Installation by default as opposed to a Full Installation.
Under MapPoint 2004 and in this era of somewhat larger hard
drives than two and a half years ago, by default the wizard
now performs a full installation.
If you already have MapPoint 2002 and can afford the disk space, I would recommend keeping it. As some of the data providers have changed and some data is no longer present (not to mention new EULA (license) restrictions regarding fleet tracking in 2004, see Appendix B) you may find yourself wanting to reference the old version from time to time.
Notwithstanding whatever your requirements or needs may be, I find the following installation procedure to be the most effective. First, copy the contents of the Setup CD to a folder on your hard drive (e.g. C:\Storage\mp2004na\) and then copy the contents of the Run disc into the same folder. Run setup.exe from that location and specify the Minimum Installation (or Standard Installation in MapPoint 2002 terms).
MapPoint will remember the location from which it was installed and not prompt for the Run disc when launched – it will use the files from your folder on the hard drive. This gives you the performance and convenience of the full installation with all the files on the hard drive as well as the flexibility of having the original installation CD's on your hard drive in case you need to install MapPoint again.
Some users have been reporting a glitch when installing MapPoint 2004 in Windows 98. The very first step prompts the user for a System Files Update with the options to repair or uninstall the system files. If you choose to repair it will prompt for a Windows XP CD, which is not convenient to say the least. Reportedly the installation proceeds fine if you simply choose to uninstall. For more information see this thread in the discussion forum.
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Updated Street Data and Points of Interest
North America
- A Better "Cut"
One of the MapPoint product’s interesting features is that it combines the street and other cartographic layers of a couple of the premiere digital street data providers, using the respective provider in the areas where each is most accurate. Navtech, located in Chicago, constructed their database using a nationwide fleet of vans equipped with GPS units making their street data the most precise and appropriate for vehicle routing applications. To make the requisite number of miles driven manageable, Navtech concentrated on major urban areas and highways. Their coverage of small towns and rural areas such as township and county roads is somewhat lacking and inferior to GDT’s coverage, which aims to have 100% coverage of the U.S.
With each release, the MapPoint teams make a “cut” merging the two data sources together using GIS tools including proprietary algorithms. In my examination and observation, MapPoint 2004 appears to be much better cut than MapPoint 2002. Below are some examples where MapPoint 2002 had some problems in the coverage which are fixed in MapPoint 2004.
[Please see Mineral Wells screenshots online.]
In the maps above you can see that streets for Mineral Wells, TX are almost completely missing from the MapPoint 2002 version. The gray area and dotted line show areas for which Microsoft used the Navtech streets. Navtech's detailed coverage apparently does not (or did not – this was a few years ago already) extend out from the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan region as far as Mineral Wells.
The next maps are an overview which shows more of what is happening. In the MapPoint 2002 map, you can see the gray area around Fort Worth roughly following the county boundaries. In particular you can see how the gray area and dotted line jut out toward the west to include Mineral Wells, as you can see in the maps above, this was not a good idea as Navtech coverage of Mineral Wells was poor. The MapPoint 2004 map shows the gray area delineated with much more precision, the dotted line does not merely follow the county lines. This shows a much greater level of care taken in assembling the maps.
[See Fort Worth And Surroundings screenshots online]
- Puerto Rico
Computer users in Puerto Rico can now enjoy many of MapPoint's features as the territory was added to MapPoint with the 2004 release and it is a welcome addition for many North American users who do business or travel in Puerto Rico.
[See Puerto Rico Overview]
[See San Juan and Bayamon]
Puerto Rico geocoding in general presents some extra challenges, compared to geocoding in the 50 U.S. states, so I decided to give it a whirl.
Working interactively MapPoint does not understand Puerto Rican
addresses placed in the Find Box or Dialog as it does not
recognize “PR” or Puerto Rico as a state. When importing a list,
however, it is able to find some streets which is interesting
(you can download a test file from MP2Kmag here), but it is not capable of matching to address ranges. It does fine as MapPoint does worldwide in finding place locations (sample file here).
Puerto Rico might be considered on par with the Mexico data which allows routing, but no geocoding functionality; but the data for Puerto Rico is much more detailed. Also, I found it interesting to discover that while address-level geocoding is not explicitly supported with Puerto Rico, it still manages to find streets. I do not know whether it is in fact GDT providing the street data for Puerto Rico, but I do know that GDT provides higher-quality
geocoding services for the island.
- Points of Interest
The number of business or points of interest have jumped
dramatically in MapPoint 2004 and now number 1.4 million, up
from 800,000 in MapPoint 2002. InfoUSA has been replaced as a
provider of business listings by Acxiom, and other places
are sourced from Navtech, GDT, and Woodall's – the "RVing" and camping information company.
While the number of Place categories has increased to 33 from 32, some place categories have disappeared. Gone are post offices and highway exit services; while in the plus column, MapPoint now has categories for grocery stores and ski areas, and banks and ATM's are now separated into two categories.
Using the downtown post office location in Madison, Wis. as a reference point, Find Nearby Places in MapPoint 2002 returns 181 locations in 24 categories (12 restaurant and 12 place) while MapPoint 2004 lists 239 places in 18 categories (4 restaurant and 14 place).
[See Madison Wis. POI's]
One striking difference you see is that not nearly as many restaurants are categorized. While 69 out of 103 restaurants (67%) are not categorized with MapPoint 2002, 92% of restaurants are not categorized in MapPoint 2004.
I decided this warranted further investigation and I did not find any other example with as large a decrease in the percentage of restaurants categorized, although in all instances there was some decrease. Here's what it looks like for Manhattan:
[See New York Restaurants]
While the results are much better for both versions (a lot fewer restaurants in All Other), the decrease in categorization still appears with the percent in the "Other" category going up from 36% to 41%. In other tests, for Des Moines, IA the percentage of uncategorized restaurants goes from 67% to 80% using a 50 mile radius. For St. Louis it goes from 56% to 57%.
Despite attempts to explain the many uses and applications of MapPoint for business, my fiancée will always first think of MapPoint as a restaurant-finding tool (i.e., show me all the Seafood restaurants within 1, 3, and 5 miles of the hotel). For her and users like her, the decrease in categorization is a step backward.
Europe
- Additional Countries
MapPoint 2004 Europe includes 4.2 million kilometers of routable roads and 400 thousand points of interest including approximately 125 thousand restaurants and 75 thousand gas stations.
The European edition of MapPoint 2004 adds four countries (Sweden, Portugal, Norway, and, Finland) to the list for which there is a detailed street network and geocoding capability bring the total number up to 15. In addition, Ireland and the Czech Republic have limited street coverage and routing, but no geocoding.
The following chart shows the percent of population with street coverage in each country.
- UK Geocoding
MapPoint can now perform street level geocoding in the UK. I borrowed a few addresses off McDonald's UK Locator to illustrate the enhancements; you can download the formatted list of locations here.
[See London McDonald's]
As you can see, MapPoint 2002 does okay using just the postcode, but it fails to find many postcodes and forces you into an interactive mode in which it is difficult to track down the proper nearest postcode MapPoint knows about. With the test above, MapPoint 2002 ended up with one McDonald's several kilometers to the west, whereas MapPoint 2004 does much better.
- Loss of Highway Coverage
MapPoint 2002 contained road and highway data for several countries in Europe that is not found in MapPoint 2004. These countries include Greece, Hungary, Romania, Russia, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Poland, the Ukraine, and a few more. Even Finland and Norway for which MapPoint 2004 has now added detailed street coverage and geocoding in certain regions or provinces, lost road and highway data in the vast, less populated areas to the north.
[See Greece]
I understand this data had been sourced from AND International in the Netherlands but for whatever reason Microsoft did not license this data for use in MapPoint 2004. You will notice that AND International is no longer listed in the Credits under "Getting Started" in the help file.
While you could not geocode using this data, it was good for routing. With MapPoint 2002 it was possible to get turn-by-turn travel directions from Tromso in the northern reaches of Norway within the Arctic Circle all the way to Baku at the eastern tip of Azerbaijan along the shores of the Caspian Sea.
[See Tromso to Baku]
The choice of cities does not illustrate the point very well, but a similar example could be made with the cities of Moscow and Athens, Greece.
The screenshots above highlight the dramatic decrease in routable highway coverage between MapPoint 2002 and 2004. All the light yellow areas on the MapPoint 2002 map contained routable highway segments. In the particular selection of area covered in the maps, the change appears striking.
Granted the routable highway segments were of limited use for most purposes besides the road trip/jaunt to the near Middle east from northern Europe, but still, say for trucking companies doing business in Russia, MapPoint 2004 Europe is much less of a useful business application. The European edition of MapPoint 2004 could have been called MapPoint 2004 Western Europe or "Western Europe Maps".
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Demographics
North America
The big story with MapPoint 2004 North America demographics is new consumer purchase behavior data from Simmons. Nearly twice the amount of demographic data is available with MapPoint 2004 than was contained in the 2002 version.
MapPoint 2004 has 214 variables for United States (up from 81) and 59 for Canada. Providers include Applied Geographic Solutions, Inc., Simmons, and Compusearch. As with MapPoint 2002, MapPoint also has 45 world-wide demographic variables at the country level. The screenshot below shows some of the new Simmons consumer profile data that is now available for the U.S.
Additional variables include casino gambling, automotive club membership, convenience store usage, department store shopping habits, insurance plans used, investment patterns, and many more.
Europe
Eight countries include between thirty and fifty demographic variables each for analysis and shading.
It appears that while Austria gained demographic coverage at the Municipality or Gemeinde level, the Netherlands lost demographic coverage at the Municipality or Gemeente level. As with MapPoint 2002, there are many more boundaries choices for mapping your own data than there are for the built-in demographics. MapPoint 2004 adds more detailed boundaries for the following countries:
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Other MapPoint 2004 Goodies
One-way Streets Depicted
If I had to rank the best new features in MapPoint 2004, the depiction of one-way streets would certainly be among the top three. While MapPoint 2002 was smart enough not to generate a route going the wrong way down one-way streets, it was not possible to visually see on the map which streets were one-way without going through the steps of generating a map. By depicting one-way streets on the map it is much easier to navigate short distances in areas where there are many one-way streets simply by looking at the map.
The following screenshots show an area in Manhattan in MapPoint 2002 and MapPoint 2004.
[See Manhattan]
Better GPS Support
Right up there with one-way streets, another great enhancement with MapPoint 2004 is the elimination of the 15-second delay when updating the position from a GPS device. MapPoint now updates the location in real-time (once per second) making it much easier to navigate while en route.
Also, Pocket Streets, an ancillary product that ships with MapPoint (as well as Streets & Trips and AutoRoute), now has GPS capabilities.
More Pushpins
Sixty additional built-in pushpins were added to MapPoint 2004, previously there were 256 built-in pushpins. Both versions have some 15,000 additional slots available for custom pushpins.
As you can see below, additional numbers were added as well as a number of transparent symbols which allow the background to show through the edges of the icons. In addition a set of eight colored flags which are not depicted were also added to MapPoint 2004.
Full Page Map Printing
MapPoint 2004 now offers the ability to stretch the printed map to the edges of the page rather than limiting the map to the area shown on the screen. This makes better use of the paper. The option to "Extend view to fit page" appears in the Print dialog under the Current map view selection.
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Two New Methods in MapPoint Object Model
ExportForPocketStreets Method
This method is the functional equivalent of the “Export Map for Pocket Streets” found in the menu under File. For literally years questions about how to programmatically create a Pocket Streets .mps file have appeared periodically in MapPoint forums. This is classic Microsoft behavior in listening to and adapting a product to user requests. I would imagine this was one of the low-hanging fruit in terms of what functionality could be easily added to MapPoint.
Here is a description from the Help File and some sample code in Visual Basic .NET.
ExportForPocketStreets method
Exports the given area as a file ready for use in PocketStreets. If the object is Map, this method exports everything in the current view. If the object is SelectedArea, this method exports everything in the current selection.
[Visual Basic .NET]
Public Class Form1
Inherits System.Windows.Forms.Form
Dim objApp As MapPoint.Application
Dim WithEvents objMap As MapPoint.Map
Dim objLoc As MapPoint.Location
Private Sub MyForm_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, _
ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
objApp = CreateObject("MapPoint.Application.NA.11")
'For the European version use: ("MapPoint.Application.EU.11")
objMap = objApp.ActiveMap
objApp.Visible = True
objApp.UserControl = True
Dim Cities() As String = _
{"San Francico", "Denver", "Chicago", "Boston"}
Dim City As String
For Each City In Cities
objLoc = objMap.FindPlaceResults(City)(1)
objLoc.GoTo()
Try
Kill("c:\" & City & ".mps")
Catch
End Try
objMap.ExportForPocketStreets("c:\" & City & ".mps")
Next
objApp.ActiveMap.Saved = True
objApp.Quit()
objApp = Nothing
End Sub
End Class
LocationFromOSGridReference Method
While it was possible to import locations using an OS grid reference with MapPoint 2002, the new method allows you to map individual grid references programmatically without resorting to linking or importing an external dataset.
A sample set of OS grid references for all the towns in the UK can be found here. This can be imported into both MapPoint 2002 and MapPoint 2004.
LocationFromOSGridReference Method
Returns a Location object for a given U.K. Ordnance Survey Grid reference string. Does not change the map view.
In addition to being able to retrieve location objects from an OSGB grid reference string, MapPoint 2004 also has the added benefit of being much more accurate with OSGB coordinates by virtue of having fixed a known bug in MapPoint 2002. A recent addition to the MP2Kmag gallery illustrates the correction.
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What's Next With MapPoint?
The entire MapPoint Team was moved into the Mobile Devices group not long ago and the group is still in the process of incorporating Vicinity/MapBlast. MapPoint Web Services 3.5 will be due out in the near future and the MapPoint Location Server is slated to be unveiled early next year.
I think you will see the group focusing more on "the next big
market", providing mapping and location services to mobile
devices, automobiles, and phones. I did see on a blog recently that Microsoft is considering making Brazil and Australia the next additions to the MapPoint suite of products.
More to the topic at hand, a big question for MapPoint users, developers, and partners is whether or not there will be another release of MapPoint in 2004 calendar year – what would be MapPoint 2005.
Also, there's a lot of room for MapPoint's functionality to
improve. Simple things such as allowing more colors, allowing
the user to choose more than eight categories when mapping
data, more control over the display of the cartographic layers
such as a map view with no place labels. It will be
interesting to see whether these and other items that
have been discussed in the forums and posted to the MapPoint wish list for years that did not make it into MapPoint 2004 will make it into the next version.
Finally, it will be interesting to see if the data in the next version of MapPoint takes an unqualified step in the positive direction rather than adding some things and trading off others.
To stay in touch with the latest MapPoint news and information,
subscribe to the MP2Kmag newsletter by sending an e-mail to
newsletter-subscribe@mp2kmag.com and by visiting the site.
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Additional Resources
I hesitate to start throwing links here because undoubtedly I will not fail to omit some terrific MapPoint resources. I've tended towards non-commercial sites and though a few have not been updated in a while, I think they are all interesting for one reason or another.
MP2K Magazine - http://www.mp2kmag.com/
MapPoint 2004 Special Issue - http://www.mp2kmag.com/update/mappoint.newsletter/2003-11-14/
MapPoint product page - http://www.microsoft.com/mappoint/2004
MapPoint Partners - http://www.mappointpartners.com
MapPoint on MSDN - http://msdn.microsoft.com/mappoint
MapPoint newsgroup - news:microsoft.public.mappoint
MapPoint Web Service newsgroup - news:microsoft.public.mappoint.webservice
Coordinate Exchange for MapPoint - http://www.hypercubed.com/projects/coordex/
Advanced GPS for MapPoint - http://www.techgt.com/agps/main.asp
Chandu Thota's blog - http://www.csthota.com/mappoint/
Authors of MapPoint 2002 for Dummies:
B.J. Holtgrewe - http://www.dataweave.com/index.html
Jill Freeze - http://www.justpc.com/
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