ArcGIS Enterprise

Celebrating ArcGIS Enterprise Implementation with Blue Raster’s Scott Geistmann

ArcGIS Enterprise is a perfect fit for deployment to a cloud platform enabling mapping and visualization, analytics, and data management. It is the foundational tool in an organization’s suite of Esri applications such as ArcGIS Pro and distributed collaborations with ArcGIS Online. Blue Raster assists its customers with Enterprise implementations in order to expand their spatial data analysis and data storage capabilities while unlocking new, more efficient workflows utilizing cloud native technologies. Having an Esri Enterprise System Design Professional on our team provides our clients with confidence and peace of mind.

ArcGIS Enterprise System Design Professional

Blue Raster is proud to celebrate our own Scott Geistmann for achieving the Esri Enterprise System Design Professional (ESDP2201) Certification. He is one of fewer than 40 experts who achieved the most recent Esri certification in the ArcGIS Enterprise system design. The certification exam covers 4 primary skill areas – Physical Architecture, Solution Architecture, Deployment and Troubleshooting, and Architectural Concepts. In order to acquire this expert-level certification, Scott mastered the four core skill areas above as well System Design, ArcGIS Monitor, System Log Parser, and eGDB Health tools. Attaining this certification is no easy feat. We applaud Scott for his hard work in ascertaining the content of hundreds of training modules and building countless simulated test environments to apply key concepts in preparation of the certification exam.

With the proliferation of cloud-based infrastructure over this most recent era of computing, Scott has taken the ball and ran with it. As Blue Raster’s resident enterprise implementation and server architecture expert, Scott provides key expertise to our customers. Scott assists customers by evaluating their current systems, weighing considerations of which upgrades to make, and mapping how to best design each customer’s system according to their unique needs. He has designed proprietary methodologies governing his approach to structuring and implementing customer systems in AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud which can be seen in the graphics below. This approach has proved invaluable in implementing more automated processes and standardization in customer systems.

AWS ArcGIS Enterprise Implementation
Azure ArcGIS Enterprise Implementation

Being in the Esri ecosystem since ArcGIS version 9.3, Scott has seen and experienced the full evolution of ArcGIS version 10 and is now looking forward to working with ArcGIS version 11 which is slated to release in 2022.

Scott

Scott’s certification as an Enterprise System Design Professional is part of Blue Raster’s pursuit of Esri's ArcGIS Cloud Specialty Program. This program certifies service providers in system architecture design, managed services, and ArcGIS Enterprise solutions in order to guide customers in their implementations of Esri’s Geospatial Cloud. Three Esri Cloud certifications are required under the scope of the Cloud Specialty Program – the Enterprise Geodata Management Professional, Enterprise Administration Professional, and Enterprise System Design Professional. Blue Raster team members, in addition to Scott, are currently working in preparation for these certifications by following individualized Esri training courses. We at Blue Raster look forward to joining this specialty and sharing our expertise and best practices with our customers.

New Era for Plant Mapping at New York Botanical Garden with PlantTracker

New York Botanical Gardens Plant Tracker App displayed in a laptop and iPhone.

Established in 1891 and covering 250 acres in the Bronx, New York Botanical Garden is the largest urban public garden in the United States. With the beauty of the collections, landscapes, and gardens it's no wonder why over one million people visit the garden annually. Looking to upgrade their public mapping presence and expand internal use of GIS, NYBG and Blue Raster partnered to develop PlantTracker. Replacing a previous tool, PlantTracker is the online catalog of NYBG's living collections used to find plants, navigate the grounds, get plant information, view photographs, and take curated tours. 

NYBG Plant Tracker App displayed on an iPhone

PlantTracker aides the public onsite and from home and also daily workflows of NYBG staff and the institutions educational programs rely on the tool. Funded through an IMLS Grant, PlantTracker replaces the legacy Garden Navigator application and provides an enhanced user experience with a map-centric and mobile-first design.

Blue Raster first deigned a GIS architecture environment and installed and configured ArcGIS Enterprise. Next, Blue Raster had to create many spatial datasets for use in GIS by converting existing CAD files and tables. This included working with exports of plants managed through BG-Base, totaling over 143,000 living and historical records. The GIS Team at Blue Raster improved the spatial accuracy of almost 700 location codes used for mapping and outlining the main garden locations. Plant photo workflows were also upgraded by integrating with the Asset Bank API.

In addition to PlantTracker, GIS upgrades allowed the opportunity to integrate Esri mobile workflows for staff. Configuration with ArcGIS Field Maps and Workforce for ArcGIS expands plant mapping workflows, allowing workers to update existing location, condition and measurement data in the field. Blue Raster works closely with BG-Base to sync both systems through a series of Python scripts that run nightly and as often as every five minutes. This means NYBG can continue to use BG-Base as the system-of-record for their collections, but take full advantage of GIS for mapping applications and field workflows.

NYBG has embraced GIS in a big way. In short time, a lot has been done to improve public and staff workflows around mapping. Explore NYBG PlantTracker to see for yourself!

NYBG Tour
NYBG Gallery
NYBG Details
planttracker

Learn more about Blue Raster's work with public gardens, cemeteries, and arboretums here.

Contact us today!

Public Health & GIS: HealthLandscape Addresses Today’s Public Health Challenges

Modern Solutions for Addressing Today’s Public Health Challenges

The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) aims to strengthen family physicians and the communities they care for through prevention and public health initiatives. As part of this effort, their innovation arm, HealthLandscape, develops geospatial data visualization to help the community find insights to improve health care.

Zeroing in on Community Health Demographics

Blue Raster has been working with the organization for over a decade, creating and modernizing GIS solutions. Recently, the team moved the Community Data Portal from Flash to Java Script.

Using this portal, health providers and public health officials can filter the data most important to their communities and their area of practice. The configurable tool enables users to explore demographic, education, income, and health disparities and can be configured for any geographic area. The tool can ingest datasets from sources like the U.S. Census Bureau, the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Robert Wood Johnson County Health Rankings, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid…the possibilities are endless. Users can create side-by-side maps between indicators (for example, diabetes and poverty) to visualize potential relationships. Additionally, users can overlay infrastructure data such as interstate networks or locations of health facilities and start to visualize patterns between the two. Graphs and charts are available to see the numbers behind the data and reports can be automatically run off the filters. The solution uses Esri ArcGIS API for JavaScript, Node, React, and ArcGIS Enterprise and Portal for ArcGIS.

Public Health Tool: HealthLandscape Community Data Portal

Meeting the Demands of High Risk Populations

Similarly, Blue Raster developed the Local Needs Assessment application that helps identify high-risk areas based on social determinants of health (“cold spots”) and poor health outcomes (“hot spots”). Identifying and mapping these high-risk areas allows for targeted approaches. The solution allows users to explore relationships between these two and identify outliers by creating scatter plots. In addition, users can customize this solution to examine childhood health, geographic population health, mental health and more public health indicators.

HealthLandscape Local Needs Assessment
HealthLandscape Community HealthView

Health organizations are developing innovative ways to harness the data integration and spatial visualization power of GIS.

GIS plays a critical role in determining where and when to intervene, improving the quality of care, increasing accessibility of service, finding more cost-effective delivery modes, and preserving patient confidentiality while satisfying the needs of the research community for data accessibility. Contact us today to learn more!


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