The Microsoft 311 Service Center with Bing Maps

 

Microsoft now has an all-in-one fully integrated solution for city governments with the 311 Citizen Services Center. It combines the power of several Microsoft technologies and has both a citizen-facing portal and a back-end management module, including interactive Bing Maps for both components. When cities use the 311 service center, citizens can easily report outages, potholes, etc. by locating them on a map. City workers and contractors can use Bing Maps for service request information and updates. 311 Service Center is another great example of how Bing Maps integrates with

Microsoft Dynamics® CRM to show the data the customer is managing, and to speed up the decision process.

To learn more about how your city can benefit from the Citizen Services Center (311), visithttp://www.microsoft.com/gov311 and watch this video.

 

Citizen-facing portal with self-service and multi-access channels


 

 

No more German Street View cities?

Based on a story from T-Online, Germany’s largest internet provider, Google won’t be capturing any more Street View imagery in Germany. In addition, they won’t be updating any of the imagery that is already there.

While we haven’t found much confirmation of that story yet, T-Online is a major source of information and the decision by Google makes sense. Given the vast issues they’ve had with Germany regarding Street View, they’d likely be better off to focus their efforts elsewhere.

germany-blurred.jpg

Interestingly, this announcement came right at the same time that their previous imagery was ruled to be legal, so it was a bit of a surprise.

It’ll be interesting to see how this works out over the next few years.

Deprecating Tables and Records feeds of the Spreadsheets API

At Google, we value quality, effective developer products. APIs are something we develop and release often. In support of this, we offer many APIs in our Labs program that allows our users to test APIs in an experimental setting.

After more than two years in service, we have made the decision to deprecate the Table and Record feeds of the Google Spreadsheets API. Having thoroughly tested these feeds and received lots of your feedback, we feel that the functionality provided by these feeds is something much better satisfied by the List and Cell feeds in the API.

Our deprecation plan for these APIs will keep these feeds in service for an additional year from today’s date.

If you are a current user of the Table and Record feeds, we highly recommend that you take the time to migrate over to the List and Cell feeds. Since the List feed works very similarly to the Records feed, this should be a smooth process.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to use the Spreadsheets API forum.