The OpenGeo Suite is designed to help you publish and share your geospatial data. Since applications like GeoExplorer and GeoServer are web-based, the OpenGeo Suite has always been itching for the cloud. We’re removing the final hurdle by making it possible to deploy without your own infrastructure—the OpenGeo Suite is now optimized for the cloud!

While there’s a lot of talk and hype about cloud computing, at its most basic it is really just externally hosted servers. In the cloud, computing power is more like a commodity or a utility. By dynamically allocating server resources, cloud deployments enable ownership while also minimizing the effort involved in managing hardware. Consider the extra benefits of high availability, dynamic storage, auto-scaling, etc., as bonuses.

Though we’ve provided limited cloud services in the past, today we are throwing the gates wide open with almost a dozen new tiers from two providers: Amazon Web Services and Skygone. Many people are familiar with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and their cloud computing platform. As leaders in cloud computing providing managed hosting solutions specifically geared towards geospatial applications Skygone is a natural fit for OpenGeo.

Signing up for the OpenGeo Suite on the cloud means having a public server provisioned for you, already configured, and ready to go within minutes. We do the hard work so you can concentrate on doing yours. Go on, upload some data with GeoExplorer and share a map with your friends to see just how easy it is.

In keeping with our desire to promote the OpenGeo Suite for any budget, we have many different options for cloud deployment. For those who want to start small, we offer tiers on Amazon with no setup fee and only a modest per hour charge. For those who want support from OpenGeo, we offer a number of plans with a range of computing power. With our partners at Skygone, we are offering a free trial of the OpenGeo Suite with no payment required to start; just enter in some information, and within a few minutes, the OpenGeo Suite is ready to go.

For more details, please see our Cloud Edition website.nd if you have any questions about our new offerings. This is only our initial release, so please send us some feedback and let us know if there are any issues with your initial deployments.

OpenGeo Suite Cloud Edition

We are excited to announce that the OpenGeo Suite is now listed on the General Services Administration (GSA) Schedule! This contract award makes it far easier for US government purchasers to purchase the OpenGeo Suite and related support services.

Although OpenGeo has been working with US Government clients for some time now, this GSA contract has the ability to simplify purchases for all US government entities, enabling greater access of our software to many new potential users.

This award is especially important to us because providing services to government is directly in line with our mission to bring the best open source geospatial software to all organizations around the world. Starting with our own backyard, of course.

Contract details:
OpenGeo has received a Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) contract on the GSA Information Technology Schedule 70. Our contract number is GS-35F-0034X.

At the FOSS4G conference in Barcelona this past week we announced the availability of new OpenGeo training materials online, all of which are licensed under the Creative Commons Share-Alike With Attribution license. Introductory workshops on the PostGIS spatial database, OpenLayers web mapping library, and the GeoServer map and feature server are all available online at workshops.opengeo.

Watch this space and the usual geo news outlets as OpenGeo continues adding new workshops and advanced materials as we develop and present them.

Thanks to new partners Orkney and Mapconcierge, the OpenGeo Suite now has local support in Japan and will soon have Japanese language support. OpenGeo’s Chris Holmes, Toru Mori of Orkney, and Taichi Furuhashi of Mapconcierge signed partnership agreements today at FOSS4G in Barcelona.

OpenGeo welcomes partners that offer geospatial web services expertise and share our mission, and this is another step towards increased support for our worldwide user base.

We all know that FOSS4G is the greatest conference of its kind of the entire calendar. Those of you who were able to make it to Sydney, Cape Town, Victoria, Lausanne or any of the other previous conferences surely know this. But FOSS4G is not just about location (there may be a pun in there), it’s also a great place to learn about new software, improve at old ones, and meet people who you previous might have known only as an email address.

This year will be no different. And OpenGeo will be descending upon Barcelona en masse.

As you may know, the first day of FOSS4G is devoted to workshops - long form, hands-on sessions where you learn the tools you need to make your work awesome. This year, we are leading or co-leading four workshops:

• Web Mapping with GeoServer
• Web Mapping with OpenLayers
• Introduction to PostGIS
• Geospatial for Java

With the exception of the last one, these are all introductory courses, designed for those who want a flavor of these tools and to see what they can do.

We don’t want to bribe you, but for our PostGIS, GeoServer and OpenLayers workshop attendees, we will be giving away t-shirts emblazoned with the software logo. Not only does this mean that you can now go one more day before doing laundry, but you can show your true colors, your PostGIS blue, your GeoServer green, or your OpenLayers, um, teal, I think.

There are just a few slots left for each workshop, so you want to register now.

And don’t just come for the workshops, we’ll be leading or co-leading tutorials and presentations too:

• Building Web Based GIS Applications with GeoExt
• SDI best practices with GeoNode
• The State of PostGIS
• Tips for the PostGIS Power User
• GeoServer CSS: Mapping in Style
• GeoNode Architecture: Wrangling $100 million worth of open source software to make SDI building a walk in the park
• Mobile Augmented Reality using FOSS
• GeoServer WPS: an integrated, extensible processing service
• GeoServer cartographic rendering: new features for map makers
• Graphical style editing with Styler: Make a basemap without seeing SLD
• Web Map Printing with GeoExt
• Performance Considerations In OpenLayers Based Web Mapping
• OpenLayers’ Future

And, of course, don’t forget the yearly WMS Performance Shootout.

You haven’t registered yet?

In addition to all of this, we’ll be at our booth, listening and talking, learning and teaching, and helping to make this year’s event as good as it can be. Come say “hi”. We’ll be easy to spot, as we’ll be wearing the t-shirts too (we got extras for ourselves).

Last month, we released the OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition 2.0. Today we bring Community Edition users up to date with the latest 2.0 features, as well as a number of experimental new ones, with the OpenGeo Suite Community Edition 2.1.0.

GeoExplorer now includes a printing feature. With a simple export to PDF you can now impress your offline friends and your mom’s refrigerator. Another GeoExplorer improvement includes version 3 of the Google Maps API. You no longer need an API key in order to host maps with Google layers on your site. And for design aficionados, Styler now preserves GeoServer SLD vendor options. We also fixed bugs around GeoWebCache layer groups and GeoServer layer names.

With 2.1.0 there is a lot more than meets the eye. We invite you to try it out and let us know what you think!

You can find answers to your questions at our growing OpenGeo Suite Community Forum. Remember, the Community Edition is free (open source and no charge), but unsupported. If you’re going into production, you’ll definitely want the OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition.

In conversations with our OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition clients, we have more than once heard the following lament:

It’s too bad that we don’t have any hours in our contract, because we’d really like this particular bug fixed.

Luckily for them, this is a simple misunderstanding between core service (“implementation”) hours, and bug fixing hours.

Core service hours are billed time towards strategically improving the capabilities of the OpenGeo Suite in the direction you desire. This includes, but isn’t limited to, items on our roadmap (such as WMS 1.3 required for INSPIRE compliance, extra dimensionality in PostGIS, and offline editing in OpenLayers). When you sign up for an Enterprise Strategic package, this comes with 350 implementation hours that you can use as you please. Currently, this is the only package that comes with implementation hours.

Bug fixes are a different matter, however. We realize that bugs happen, so bug fixes are in everyone’s best interest. That is why we offer unlimited bug fixes on every one of our Enterprise Edition packages. Unlimited. We mean it. If you’re an Enterprise Edition client and you find a bug in our software, let us know and we’ll fix it, no questions asked (well, except for maybe a log file and the steps required to reproduce the bug).

So if you’re wondering why you should become an OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition client, you can add the peace of mind that comes with constantly improving software. And now you are free to lament about other things.

“What are the Netherlands known for, Alex?”

OK, maybe football too (I guess we’ll find out on Sunday). In the meanwhile, take a look at these recommendations for the Netherlands’ national SDI (PDOK, which is “Publieke Dienstverlening op de Kaart”, or “Mapping Services for the Public” in English).

On the policy side, in Section 2, the document notes “Dutch public administrations need to provide explanations if they do not use open standards and if they decide against using open source software when making procurement decisions”, but then goes on to provide two direct operational reasons for going with open source:

1. PDOK is foreseen to become a relatively large system. It has to support hundreds of data services some of which may experience very high demands. In order to address these high performance demands a great number of servers may be needed (with a load balancing mechanism). Proprietary software is often licensed by number of cores/cpu’s which are used by the software simultaneously. A highly scalable system may therefore be confronted with high license costs.

2. Open source software components will not provide all functionality which is required by PDOK, but this will also be the case with proprietary software. In case of open source there are more means to exert influence on the directions of future developments. PDOK may also contribute to the development of open source components. These developments will then directly be beneficial to PDOK and its partners but also to the entire (international) community which makes a good case for spending public funds.

Lots of foresight there. The unit cost of any enhancements that open source components require to meet the functional needs of the system will be spread out over every server deployed in every country in Europe that follows a similar architecture.

In Section 4, we get to software recommendations.

First, a nice familiar decomposition of the web mapping architecture, which provides lots of flexibility in choosing components. And what components do they recommend for PDOK? I’m glad you asked!

From the point of view of an enterprise GIS system, GeoServer seems to be the most promising solution.

GeoServer includes a version of GeoWebCache. This is a proxy server between a map client and a map server.

A PostgreSQL database requires limited resources and can easily be implemented in a virtual environment. The advantage of this is that the virtualisation platform can be used to scale the database … For that reason, PostgreSQL is the database for PDOK; it is open source and it integrates very well with GeoServer

OpenLayers seems to be the most suitable library for client-side webmapping for the requirements. OpenLayers is an open source web mapping client library and has many required features out of the box, supporting the required formats and much more.

The GeoExt project combines ExtJS with OpenLayers already, which may be useful depending on the extra client-functionality needed.

We have been working hard over the past couple years to make sure all these components of the geospatial stack play will together, and more recently selling a bundled package of components, but it’s great to get the external validation of a big organization looking at all the parts and saying “these work great together, we should use them”.

I can’t wait to open up the Amsterdam office!

Since our first release of the OpenGeo Suite in January, our team has been working consistently to improve and refine the software. Much of this was based on feedback from our users, leading us to create a Community Forum where users can share their ideas and solutions. We have been periodically releasing a free Community Edition of the OpenGeo Suite, both as a testing environment for new features, and as a way for users to get the very latest in our technology.

Today, we release version 2.0 of the OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition. Here are just some of the many new features that comprise this software:

• Fully integrated PostGIS, including the new pgShapeLoader, a graphical shapefile loading utility.
• A new application, GeoEditor, that allows for web-based editing of geospatial features.
• New code samples and recipes to help you design your own mapping applications.
• Individualized packages of each application to integrate with an existing IT infrastructure.

And of course, all components are updated to the most recent stable version: PostGIS 1.5.1, GeoServer 2.0.2, GeoWebCache 1.2.2, and GeoExt 0.7.

With the OpenGeo Suite, you have all you need at your disposal to publish your data and maps on the web, as well as create virtually any web-based geospatial application for your organization. We hope that the new version 2.0 of the OpenGeo Suite will make your work even easier.

Register now to get your copy of the OpenGeo Suite 2.0. And please let us know what you think.

Not as exciting as our first kiss, but still pretty exciting: our first OpenGeo re-seller is Spatialytics in Quebec. That means that users of the OpenGeo Suite in Quebec will be able to receive front-line support from local staff who (importantly) speak French (with the right accent)!

We expect resellers to form the backbone of the ecosystem around the OpenGeo Suite. In a world with 40 time zones and hundreds of languages there is no way one organization can be everywhere. We want to focus as much of our internal effort as possible on improving the Suite, the core Suite projects, and the learning materials that go with them. Partners will be the bridge between our core team and customers around the world.

Welcome Spatialytics, to the OpenGeo family!

(Want to explore becoming a re-seller? Drop us a line, inquiry at opengeo dot org.)