SharePoint and GIS Integration for Dawson Geophysical

The steadily growing popularity of SharePoint has put the question of how best to go about integrating GIS with a SharePoint implementation at the top of many customers minds. While some consultants claim to have excellent solutions in this space, our experience has been that well-conceived integrations can be fairly specific to a customer’s deployment of SharePoint, and that few of the integration solutions are as mature as their marketing suggests.

One recent integration project we performed was for Dawson Geophysical, who had implemented SharePoint as a web portal for both internal staff and customers. Dawson commissioned a mapping system with which to expose data and exploration of information related to thousands of projects being completed for many customers. The delivered application leverages the same security model used for Dawson’s SharePoint portal, allowing approved classes of users to gain access to appropriate project data and capabilities through a single sign in process. Data views, lists, and libraries are also integrated into the Silverlight-based mapping system through affiliation with user classes and related project associations.

The solution is now in production use, supporting a variety of end user needs including the tracking of right of way/right of entry status and geotechnical findings for particular project areas and sites within project areas.