Issues with GeoMedia WebMap 6.1

Over the last few days on the Directions Magazine email list, there have been a couple of mentions of a few different problems people are encountering with GeoMedia WebMap 6.1.

1) Rendering speed – With the release of 6.1, Intergraph merged much of the missing GeoMedia 6.0 functionality in GeoMedia WebMap 6.1. One of these new additions was with enterprise libraries. Now, although I haven’t received too much feedback on the issue, it sounds as if GeoMedia WebMap Publisher (WebPub) will now automatically check the library for a style. If the named style is in the library, that named style will overwrite what has been symbolized in GeoMedia. Long story short, if my line is symbolized as red in GeoMedia (WebPub Admin), but I have a green named style in my library (the named style name must match the name of the legend entry), than my line will appear green in my WebPub site. Well apparently, this checking is really slowing down the rendering performance of GeoMedia WebMap.

Now, I will say that if my understanding is correct, this seems pretty cool. However, after thinking about it some, I’m not really sure I would have that functionality at the top of my requirements list. Personally, I find that my symbology is fairly standardized. Once I have things symbolized a certain way, it’s not changing too much if at all. It has been my experience that people like consistency with the look and feel of their maps. What do others think here? With that said, I would much rather have rendering speed rather than something that would make my job a little easier on a very rare occasion.

2) Remote publishing with an Oracle Connection – There have also been reported issues where if you publish your geoworkspace remotely and you have an Oracle connection in your geoworkspace, then you will encounter issues with hotspots, select by, and other commands where you interact with vectors on the map.

All in all, both are frustrating. The latest word is that these issues should be addressed as part of the first GeoMedia WebMap minor release due out in the August/September time frame. With that said, it really looks like Intergraph pushed to get the GeoMedia WebMap 6.1 suite out fairly soon after the GeoMedia suite was released. This was most likely due to both internal and customer driven pressure. After all, how many users would’ve been happy to hear that GeoMedia Pro was released early this year but we won’t see GeoMedia WebMap/Pro released until September? That wouldn’t fly with anybody. So, Intergraph made a tough decision, but I think one that makes sense. After all, I’m sure there are quite a few customers out there where the two issues above won’t greatly impact them. Of course, it would’ve been useful if Intergraph had made it a bit more clear to the users of the current limitations of the GMWM release.

In the meantime, for those customers that will be impacted by this, I would heavily suggest you hold off until the first minor release. And even after the first minor release, make sure to test on a development server before going production. After all, that’s why Intergraph gives you the free development license ;-).

UPDATE I received a correction from one of my contacts in support at Intergraph soon after making the post. Apparently my initial understanding above (now crossed out) was incorrect. Apparently, Intergraph has only changed the way the symbology data are stored. Before they were stored as part of the metadatabase in a separate table. It is now stored in the LIBRARY table that’s part of any Library Connection. With that said, it seems (at least in my eyes) unlikely that that change is really causing the slowness. However, it’s very likely that the 6.0 GeoMedia symbology functionality that was rolled into GMWM 6.1 could be causing this slowness.