Google Maps API

For those who don't know, Fronde are the sole NZ partner for Google apps until at least the New Year 2010.

Most of the Google work so far has been undertaken by the team down in Wellington, apart from the very shiny Track-U application for the Blackberry created by the Java devs here in Auckland. We wanted to get more people involved up here in Auckland so we're assigning ourselves internal projects. We're all taking a specific area to make that our specialist subject as there are a large variety of Google apps, most of which are quite large when you start to really get into them to see what you can do with them.

I'm currently looking into the maps API and it's proving quite interesting. Three of us are creating an interactive floor plan for both floors of the office, we're then going to hook it into MOSS. I've created the tiles for both floors, that was the easy part and they did show up beautifully, then came a bit more of a challenge with setting up switching between floors. I've now got a lovely set of buttons showing up and they switch between floors, but the tiles have now disappeared. Mission today - get the maps back. 1 step forward, 2 steps back.... We'll be very good at this by the time we've finished this task we've set ourselves.

Whilst I'm working on the underlying map set up, Ryan is creating some gorgeous images that I can use as maps and Gwen is working on the overlays code, figuring out how overlays work and how best to implement them. Gwen is also our Sharepoint guru, so she'll be leading us when we get to the part where we want to hook into MOSS.

As well as doing all of the basics, we're also looking to set up some dynamic interaction with the map. At the moment I can set up to interact with an excel spreadsheet so that you can select people from a drop down list and find them on the map, this is nice and easy for an office admin to update when staff join/leave, however, the eventual aim would be to use AD, we just need to figure out how to do that. That way if someone joins or leaves, the map is automatically up to date when they're set up in the system. Groovy eh? :)

Anyway, better get back to it.... :)