Virtual Earth FAQ

• What is the Virtual Earth platform?
  The Virtual Earth platform encompasses the next evolution of the MapPoint Web Service offering with innovative new capabilities. The Virtual Earth platform is not only a new brand name; it represents a richer, more powerful offering from Microsoft to companies in all industries. Developers have the flexibility to tap into either of the two Virtual Earth application programming interfaces (API): MapPoint Web Service API using SOAP XML to communicate with customer applications or Virtual Earth Map Control, which lets users make request via JavaScript to an AJAX map object.
• Where does Virtual Earth have rooftop geocoding?
  Virtual Earth currently has rooftop geocoding in the United States and Japan
• What percentage rooftop geocoding does Virtual Earth have?
  Virtual Earth has 40% rooftop geocoding in the United States and 90% in Japan.
• Is Virtual Earth 6.0 backwards compatible?
  Virtual Earth version 6.0 is backwards compatible only for version 5.0.
• What is the maximum number of points for multipoint routing?
  The recommended number is 50 points. Note that, regardless of the number of points, the time it takes to calculate the route is proportional to the total distance of the entire multipoint route.
• Does Virtual Earth support optimized routing?
  No, in version 6.0, Virtual Earth routes in the order of the points.
• What version of Safari does Virtual Earth support?
  Virtual Earth supports version 2 of Apple Safari.
• What coverage does Virtual Earth have for traffic overlay information?
  Coverage includes traffic overlays for more than 50 major metropolitan areas in the United States.
• Why do I need a token?
  This is a requirement for business customers for authentication and for SLA support and may be required for other users to receive certain features in the future.
• Is localization supported in multipoint routing?
  Not at this time. This feature is planned for a future release.
• Does Virtual Earth support KML?
  The consumer version of Virtual Earth on maps.live.com supports Keyhole Markup Language (KML) but is not supported through the API at this time.
• What kinds of information will commercial customers get in reports?
  Reports will include transaction counts per day broken down by APIs for a given date range by day and by API.
• How do commercial customers access transaction reports?
  Reports can be accessed through the CSS website.
• Does Virtual Earth have incident data or construction data for traffic?
  No, not in version 6.0.
• If I am an existing Microsoft MapPoint® Web Service (MWS) customer, can I use my MWS account to get a token for Virtual Earth?
  Yes.
• How do I get a token or account for my company?
  You can get a token by creating a Virtual Earth Platform Developer Account. Please call Tetrad at 1-800-663-1334 for more information.
• Can I overlay other types of formats onto maps, such as a Word document or text file?
  The input formats are .pdf and raster image file types that Microsoft Windows® Presentation Foundation supports (.gif, .jpg, .png, and such).
• What happened to the MapPoint Web Service? What is the difference between the Virtual Earth platform and MapPoint Web Service?
  The Virtual Earth platform encompasses the next evolution of the MapPoint Web Service offering with innovative new capabilities. The Virtual Earth platform is not only a new brand name; it represents a richer, more powerful offering from Microsoft to companies of all industries. Developers have the flexibility of tapping into one of the two Virtual Earth application programming interfaces (API): MapPoint Web Service API using SOAP XML to communicate with customer applications and Virtual Earth Map Control that lets users make request via JavaScript to an AJAX map object.
• What is the difference between the Virtual Earth platform and Windows Live Local?
  The Virtual Earth platform powers a variety of consumer, enterprise and government applications. Windows Live Local, an online local search and mapping tool, is powered by Virtual Earth and enables people to learn, discover and explore a specific location. Virtual Earth represents a commitment by Microsoft to produce location-enabling platforms and technology that can be embedded and used with a wide range of enterprise, retail and web-based products delivered by Microsoft and the developer community. Microsoft will continue to enhance Virtual Earth and those improvements will be delivered through Windows Live Local as well as through the APIs.
• What benefits does the Virtual Earth platform provide customers?
  The Virtual Earth platform provides customers with unique imagery, powerful mapping and search capabilities, a cost-effective investment, easy and flexible programming. The Virtual Earth platform license comes with a strong service level commitment and can be easily integrated with other Microsoft .NET-connected Web services.
• What type of applications benefit from the Virtual Earth platform?
  The Virtual Earth platform is designed to enable a broad range of consumer, enterprise and government applications. All of the following examples use the same core technology allowing developers to easily deploy all of these applications throughout an organization. • Website Store Locators – One of the most widely used applications of the Virtual Earth platform is to enable store, facility or agency locators for websites. In addition to comprehensive mapping and geocoding capabilities the Virtual Earth platform provides an immersive and highly-visual map-based search. Bird’s eye imagery combined with drag-n-drop maps allows site visitors to search and visualize places before actually going there. • Information Portals – Dynamic map-based searches are becoming a must-have implementation for information portals. Virtual Earth enables companies to create new value-added services by integrating locally relevant information. • Travel Portals – By combining bird’s eye imagery and powerful mapping capabilities, companies can provide virtual tours and trip planning capabilities as part of their websites. The ability to layer extensive point of interest (POI) datasets, such as restaurants and hotels, and other content layers increases customer loyalty because they are able to find locally relevant information without leaving the travel portal’s site. • Mobile Location Services – Enterprises can enable consumers with connected mobile device and layer additional data to find movie theaters, stores, and other locations while consumers are mobile. The Virtual Earth platform can also deliver driving directions and aerial imagery to the consumers’ mobile device. • Call Center Applications – The Virtual Earth platform can be integrated into call routing mechanisms, so that incoming requests can be routed using location, such as sales territories. Further, service representatives can provide location-specific information, such as customers reporting dropped calls, to service groups that can analyze problems. • Fleet/Asset Tracking – The Virtual Earth platform is used to integrate high-quality routing and mapping into fleet tracking applications, such as monitoring delivery trucks or installers. The bird’s eye imagery enables delivery drivers to shorten the delivery time by visualizing destinations before arriving there. Enterprises also use Virtual Earth to create routes with as many as 50 stops.
• What are the most important services offered in the Virtual Earth platform?
  Companies can use the Virtual Earth platform to take advantage of the following services: • Visualization Services: Companies can enable customers to visualize business or asset locations and surroundings via unique bird’s eye imagery and find locally relevant information quickly and easily. • Spatial Services: Companies can offer customers step-by-step driving direction, flexible geocoding and proximity searches. • Data Management Services: the Virtual Earth platform provides storage and batch geocoding of company's points of interests (POI) data. Databases can be tailored with hundreds of searchable attributes.
• What is the bird's eye imagery in the Virtual Earth platform?
  This feature allows consumers to change from road or aerial view to a bird’s eye (45 degree) view of the map. Currently, this feature covers more than a quarter of United States including major cities such as New York, LA, San Francisco, and Boston. As with the road and aerial map styles, you can use the standard navigation methods for moving a bird's eye image: you can click and drag the map, use the arrow keys on the keyboard, and use the PLUS SIGN (+) and HYPHEN (-) keys to zoom in and out. You can also click the zoom box to choose one of the two available zoom levels.
• The Virtual Earth platform provides a lot of flexibility and customization for your applications. You can choose to have dynamic "drag-n-drop" maps available through the Virtual Earth Map Control or over 30 specialty map styles available via MapPoint Web Service API.
  The Virtual Earth platform provides a lot of flexibility and customization for your applications. You can choose to have dynamic "drag-n-drop" maps available through the Virtual Earth Map Control or over 30 specialty map styles available via MapPoint Web Service API.
  
• How frequently is the data updated?
  We are continually updating Virtual Earth with new imagery provided by our partners. Ensuring our customers have the best possible information from this new service is critical to us. We are not only working to update the existing aerial Imagery, we are also adding new data such as birds eye and global satellite imagery at 15 meters. We are confident that upcoming upgrades will continue to deliver a service that allows our customers to search locations like never before.
• How do I purchase the Virtual Earth services?
  Customers purchase the Virtual Earth services as an annual subscription direct from Tetrad. There are two primary licensing models: • Per user is for "known user" applications, such as within a call center or fleet tracking applications. • Per transactions is for "anonymous user" applications, such as a Web site locator or travel portal. Pricing is dependent on the numbers of users and/or transactions you purchase.
• What level of integration exists between Visual Studio and Virtual Earth?
  The Virtual Earth Map Control is AJAX-based and does not currently support integration with Visual Studio help system or with the WYSIWYG designers and editors. However, developers using Visual Studio’s Visual Web Developer still benefit from the debugging, code management, and other features. The MapPoint Web Service SOAP SDK integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio help system. Once users have registered the MapPoint Web Service Web Services Description Language (WSDL) with their Visual Studio Solution, Visual Studio .NET automatically generates the methods and classes for the MapPoint Web Service. The MapPoint Web Service was built from the ground up to be a great .NET-connected Web service and is completely integrated with Visual Studio. Microsoft thinks Visual Studio is the best development environment to use with the MapPoint Web Service.
• Can the Virtual Earth platform be used with other platforms such as Solaris, Java, Perl and Linux?
  Yes, it can be programmatically accessed by virtually any development environment that conforms to the required standards. The MapPoint Web Service API is a standard SOAP XML-based Web service exposed through WSDL. So long as your development platform of choice supports SOAP web service standards, it can be used with MapPoint Web Service, Because the Map Control is a client side component run in the web browser, there is no dependency on the development environment. The control can be developed in any environment that can output standard HTML and JScript code for the client, even in environments that can only deliver static pages.
• Is the Virtual Earth platform just for Web-based solutions?
  No. Any solution that consumes the Virtual Earth platform needs an Internet connection, but that doesn’t mean the Virtual Earth is only for Web applications. There are many instances where the Virtual Earth platform is part of a rich solution or automated process running on a server. Currently the Map Control is only supported running in a Web browser, but the SOAP APIs can be used with virtually any application architecture.
• What are the performance and scalability goals for the Virtual Earth platform?
  One of the design goals of the Virtual Earth platform is to deliver exceptional performance and scalability. For operations planning purposes and for problem identification and resolution, Microsoft’s response times are closely monitored. Virtual Earth serves a range of applications, including Windows Live Local and other Microsoft properties, which alone already generate millions of transactions per day with very high performance. The end-user perception of the overall solution's performance rests on a combination of the programmable, XML-based service and the user interface solution being built. Microsoft provides extensive sample code and best practices to ensure optimal end-to-end performance for customers’ end users.
• How does Microsoft help ensure the privacy of customer data uploaded to the service? How does the Virtual Earth platform help maintain security and privacy?
  Customer data uploads and other customer service site operations are encrypted using 128-bit Secure Socket Layer (SSL) connections. All SOAP API calls to the MapPoint Web Service API must present customer-unique credentials, and customers can change their passwords at any time to protect their accounts from unauthorized access. The Virtual Earth data center has a number of systems and processes in place to prevent and deal with security issues. Our systems also run the latest Microsoft operating systems and enterprise servers and are kept current with the most recent security patches.
• What devices does this service support?
  The Virtual Earth platform is device independent. We provide sample code and different map styles that are optimized for different devices, but there is always an application that sits on or between the device and the Virtual Earth platform.

TETRAD is a Microsoft Virtual Earth Solution Provider

For more information on Virtual Earth, please call us at 1-800-663-1334 or request more information.