Many Business Intelligence solutions involve some sort of regional report which in the past has been shown in text in perhaps a spreadsheet type view. In this day and age businesses are increasingly wanting more and more aesthetically pleasing, rich reports. Step in the Microsoft Virtual Earth Platform.
Virtual Earth Overview
Virtual Earth : "The Microsoft Virtual Earth platform is an integrated set of services that provides quality geospatial data, rich imagery, cutting-edge technology, and dependable performance that helps organizations visualize data and provide immersive end-user experiences. Backed by a commitment to ongoing investments in innovation, driven by customer feedback, the Virtual Earth platform continues to offer new map detail and precision imagery, feature enhancements, and robust platform capabilities." Microsoft Definition.
Microsoft Live Maps is powered by Virtual Earth and you can see this in action here.
Virtual Earth platform includes an SDK which can be invoked using SOAP based HTML or JavaScript APIs.
Virtual Earth SDK
The Virtual Earth SDK is very easy to use and invoke. Details of the SDK and how to invoke methods can be found in the interactive SDK.
Example Reports
There are many types of reports that Virtual Earth can help visualise but one that comes to mind is: KPI reports e.g. Sales Performance.
Virtual Earth can give you instant visualisation on how regions are performing using a few neat visualisation tricks.
A nice way I find to visualise performance in regions is "Heat Mapping". You can add colour to your map in areas where performance is good and bad, giving users instant visualisation of performance.
A screen shot is of example locations and heat mapping is below.
Simple Locations
You can add your own icons for locations by using the following code:
function AddPushpinToLayer(layer, name, longitude, latitude, icon, html)
{ shape = new VEShape(VEShapeType.Pushpin, new VELatLong(latitude, longitude));
shape.SetTitle(name);
shape.SetDescription(html);
shape.SetCustomIcon(icon);
layer.AddShape(shape);
}
I prefer to use layers where possible as once added you can simply show and hide them.
Performance Heat
As you can see from the heat map above the South area is not performing too well however London is performing very well. The circles used can be defined as:
Large Green = Best Performance
Large Red = Worst Performance
You could show this in colour intensity using the transparent colours if you wish.
The ability to draw circles code used above was adapted from this blog entry http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2BBC66E99FDCDB98!7927.entry
Once the data is added the full Virtual Earth functionality is available to the end user so they can switch to 3D View, Road View, Birds Eye view, etc. You can also add your own HTML to the hover over tags so you could add graphs of performance if you wish for example. You can also create events on mouse clicks for example that might export the data to a spreadsheet.
The above shows how I've used Virtual Earth to simply zoom in on a location and show the Custom HTML tag.
Conclusion
You can see how Virtual Earth can be used to show data for a number of scenarios to help visualise data and having done a simple report like the above I can tell you the SDK is very easy to use and there are also a lot of examples out there to work from.
Some people might see this as a bit of a gimmick but I think it is important to make your reports look good and by spending a bit more time you can produce great looking reports.
References
http://www.microsoft.com/virtualearth/platform/default.aspx - Microsoft Definition of Virtual Earth Platform.
http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2BBC66E99FDCDB98!7927.entry - For code to draw Circles.