GIS Free

posted by admin on Jun 19

Product Overview
This free plug-in from CMC International creates Google Maps of individual contact addresses from within Microsoft Outlook. (It has a catchy name, too: “Google Maps plug-in for Outlook.”) What makes this product interesting is that it is an advertising vehicle that promotes ESRI’s BusinessMAP (which CMC sells, along with other ESRI and non-ESRI products). Providing free, useful products is nothing new to the advertising world, but this seems like a fairly new twist in the GIS industry.

How to get it
You can download the plug-in.

After you’ve installed it, you’ll see a new button on the MS Outlook GUI called “Show Map.”

What you see
In this case, I created just one contact in Outlook in Atlanta. Below is my map, showing the contact.

Here’s a zoomed-in satellite view of the contact.

Summary
There are two major aspects of this plug-in that I like: it is very useful and it is free. A third benefit is that it demonstrates how mapping functionality can be added to many applications in an easy-to-use manner. Give it a try and see where your contacts are.