Written by Dinesh Thanigasalam, Commercial Director
We’d like to wish all our customers and partners a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all of us here at Aligned Assets! If you’ve not seen our Merry Christmas card yet, you can do so here.
We’d like to thank all our customers and partners for their continued support and are delighted to welcome some new organisations into the Aligned Assets community. Building on last year’s achievements, we have continued to grow in 2019, both in terms of the number of customers we are now working with and the development of our products – some of which have brought quite radical improvements to their use and outcomes. We have further product development road mapped for 2020, and we very much look forward to working with you all next year.
We continue to place a huge emphasis on nurturing trust and integrity with all our customers, and enjoy the open and honest dialogue that brings. This really helps us to understand your business needs better, enabling us to fine tune our products to meet your needs more specifically. As ever, we’re committed to providing you with the very best solutions by working with any of your current suppliers, as well as continuing to work with a wide portfolio of partners, including Ordnance Survey, GeoPlace, Esri, Cadcorp, and Jadu to name a few.
New additions to the Aligned Assets community
While we continue to work with our highly valued, established customers, we are really pleased to welcome some new additions to our community. We really look forward to working with you all in 2020 and beyond.
- Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough
- Newcastle upon Tyne City Council
- Colchester Borough Council
- Broxbourne Borough Council
- Bristol City Council
- Bournemouth, Christchurch & Poole Council – New Unitary Authority
- Dorset Council – New Unitary Authority
- Somerset West and Taunton Council – New Unitary Authority
- West Suffolk Council – New Unitary Authority
Advanced product development
Street Naming and Numbering
This was completely overhauled this year and is now BS7666 compliant, making it much easier to integrate with iManage, therefore boosting efficiency and accuracy. This new release of SNN is far more user friendly, and boasts some powerful features, such as advanced mail merge capabilities that allow sophisticated letter templates to be created with ease. It will soon also be able to export properties to live tables in iManage and the auto-update of references back to SNN.
Local only streets feature in Bluelight
This highly requested feature provides users the ability to create their own local only streets by specifying the start and end of a street, including visually plotting it on the map within the Bluelight gazetteer, and naming it in line with the naming convention at their service. This is then stored in the ABP format which means it can be shared with other people and systems either through SinglePoint or iExchange.
New version of iManage supporting 64 bit MapInfo
This new release of iManage supports the most advanced of MapInfo products, including all the new GIS features enabling easier customisation and interaction.
New release of SinglePoint including enhanced security.
Development of Symphony Search
We have been working with a partner to develop a fast and highly responsive address lookup using the most advanced technology to develop this. This is not ready to be fully announced yet so look out for news on this in the new year.
Development of Symphony Echo
A new product that can be used to implement the address lookup capability provided by SinglePoint for operational Windows or web-based systems that cannot consume our web services.
Cloud based hosted solutions
We are seeing an increase in organisations moving across to our cloud based hosted solutions, and expect this to continue rising in the years ahead as organisations look to reduce infrastructure and maintenance costs.
Working with partners
Landmark and Smart DCC
We are working with Landmark Information Group to design, build and operate the registration and address components of a new energy supply Central Switching Service (CSS) for Smart DCC. Led by Ofgem, this programme aims to support next-working-day switching for gas and electricity. Read more about this partnership.
Ordnance Survey
We are working with OS to trial a Street Junctions dataset in AddressBase Premium format. Once this is ready to roll out, it will be of huge benefit to all our emergency services customers as it’ll enable a far more accurate location for mobilising crews. We are also testing daily change only updates for AddressBase Premium – a massive improvement on the current six-weekly updates.
Cadcorp
Our enhanced integration and close working with Cadcorp means our gazetteer products integrate seamlessly with Cadcorp’s GIS. This enables users to use the preferred GIS alongside our gazetteer product out of the box with minimal configuration.
Esri UK
Enhanced integration and close working with Esri, including the new ArcGIS Search Locator. As above, this means our customers can select their preferred GIS alongside our gazetteer product off the peg with minimal configuration.
Jadu
Growth in full GB address lookups and integration with Jadu. This means that by using our hosted ABP solution with SinglePoint, local authorities can have this resource available to use within their Jadu products very quickly and cost effectively with no maintenance overhead for keeping the addresses up to date.
Aligned Assets communications
Customer portal
Our Customer portal was developed and launched earlier this year. This is a fantastic resource where customers can access the Product Knowledge Base, join or start discussions on the Customer Forum, or log review a support case.
New website
We have been developing a new website that should be easier to navigate and therefore find what you’re after. We plan to post new content monthly, so please do revisit the website to keep abreast of developments. We have an eta launch of pre-Christmas, so we’ll certainly be up and running for the new year.
Additions to the team
We are a growing company, so we’ve been delighted to welcome some new people to the team:
- Antoney Krishnasingham: 1st Line Support Analyst
- Christine St Matthew-Daniel: Software Tester
Looking ahead to 2020
We will continue to develop our products and services to ensure we are providing the very most advanced gazetteer solutions available on the market. We have an ambitious road map of development and will be working hard to fulfil that.
In addition to our usual events, ie exhibiting at the GeoPlace Conference and organising our own User Group meetings, we are also planning to exhibit at the Esri Conference for the first time. In line with our work with Landmark and Smart DCC on the Central Switching Service for next-working-day energy switching, we will be testing out a presence at Utility Week Live at the NEC.
As ever, we shall continue to push the boundaries of excellence, and look forward to your company on this journey.
And finally…
We’d like to wish you all a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! If you need to get hold of us over the Christmas period, check out our Christmas Support Hours here.
All the very best wishes and we’ll see you in the next decade!
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