Maintaining infrastructure in your community does not come with a low price tag, and it is an integral part of the services you provide to your residents.  Utility systems in particular top of the list in terms of high dollar capital investments, as they require frequent maintenance, upgrades, and replacement.  To help defray some of these costs, several communities have chosen to create a storm water utility fee to support the ongoing maintenance of their storm water systems.

Leaders from four of our GIS Consortium communities including Mike Reynolds from Buffalo Grove, Manny Gomez from Highland Park, Brian Smith from Wheeling and Steve Saunders from Winnetka will present on how they approached this project.  Please join us for this webinar to learn from their collective expertise.

What you will learn:

• What each community set out to accomplish
• What was the final outcome achieved
• Obstacles encountered along the way and how they were resolved
• What these leaders would do differently if they could do it all over again

We look forward to your participation and feedback. Please forward to whoever you think might be interested.

The Collector App is being utilized by many of the GIS Consortium communities to gather valuable data. These projects have been used to empowered staff to make informed decisions as well as allowing them to easily collect data that has been requested for years. Since you, our clients, have embraced Collector with such enthusiasm, we have created best practices for planning these projects in order to help you achieve the results you want. This month we will be highlighting Collector project planning best practices, as well as just a few of the data collection success stories.

What you will learn:
• How Collector is being used to help make data driven decisions
• How to utilize Collector to achieve a long term goal
• How Collector is being used to streamline repetitive tasks
• How MGP is planning to help clients start collecting data more quickly

Making decisions in your community becomes easier when supported with insightful reports and proactive analysis. Reports produced from GIS data assist local government by overcoming “big data” and providing clarity in place of confusion. This webinar will demonstrate various ways on how communities are leveraging GIS reports to think strategically, and better serve their customers by minimizing cost, increasing safety, and increasing transparency.

What you will learn:

• How to generate reports from the mobile ESRI Collector Application
• How you can view trends and track changes in your online maps
• How crime reports can be used to increase public awareness and the allocation of emergency services

Every community in the Consortium uses a variety of programs and databases to store critical enterprise information. The challenge most communities often face with these systems is that not all stakeholders of the data have easy access to it or are proficient in how to use the programs themselves. This webinar will demonstrate the various ways that communities are using GIS to connect to and integrate with the information stored in these enterprise systems.  Examples will range from simple integration, such as creating custom display layers from program data, to total integration, such as the ability to edit GIS data directly in a 3^rd party program.

What you will learn:

1. How to create a visual representation of the information stored in a database
2. How to utilize live database connections to your most commonly used systems and visualize them in MapOffice™.  Examples will include Firehouse, Springbrook, and Laserfiche.
3. How to extract data from AutoCAD and import it directly into GIS
4. How to edit GIS data in 3^rd party software and send the changes directly to your GIS database.