LizardTech made many product announcements last week, and I had the opportunity to visit with the product manager Jon Skiffington to discuss their latest advancements. The overriding takeaway from this meeting was the fact that software vendors listen closely to customers when prioritizing their development plans, and that customer-centric action takes many forms.

The latest release of LizardTech’s flagship product, GeoExpress 7, adds many user-centric improvements that enhance workflows and save time.

  • Despeckling became a problem mostly with compressed NAIP imagery. This imagery comes with black edge artifacts that when compressed are no longer solid black and as a result are hard to strip out when creating an image mosaic. New tools allow for much easier cropping and despeckling of this imagery.
  • The latest release also adds the ability to crop compressed imagery to a shape file outline or to crop to a grid
  • The product has long provided a long list of projections that can be applied to compressed imagery in order to be readily imported into other products. Realizing that users typically have just a short list of favorites, the developers have added the ability to save your favorite projections so that it’s much easier to select the one you want.
  • This latest release also aligns features with the Express Server for easier imagery distribution, and Spatial Express to store this data in the Oracle Spatial database.
  • A new metadata editor enhances image editing and export by allowing users to easily add custom metadata fields and export selected imagery easily within the tool.

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LizardTech impressed me a few years ago by initiating a floating license for their products, based on the understanding that in large workgroups all users don’t need direct access to their software at the same time. The floating license solved a problem that nagged many network administrators, but there was an unintended consequence. Users with laptops were denied access when in the field, because they no longer had connectivity to the network. LizardTech just solved that problem by adding the ability to check-out a floating license key for use when not connected to the network.

Concurrent with these releases are several customer-facing communication mechanisms. The launch of both an online forum discussion site and a community blog, open channels for the company to interact more closely with customers. These offerings also enhance customer to customer interaction for the sharing of common problems and solutions. While a customer-centric approach to development has served this company well, this added transparency should empower the users more to share solutions directly with each other.

Today, LizardTech added another piece, the Express Server portal site. This portal is designed for GeoExpress users to test the functionality of the Express Server. The site allows users to publish and view their imagery in WMS applications, ArcIMS, and several Web applications, including Javascript, Flash and Ajax. The portal clearly illustrates the capability and ease of imagery distribution that Express Server provides, and makes it much easier for customers to trial the capability and sell the concept to management.

I continue to be impressed by LizardTech for its customer-centric approach to product development. Not only do they continue to add functionality that meets market demands, but they work toward streamlining user interaction with their products to make the use and manipulation of compressed imagery as easy and efficient as possible.

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