Those of you out there who have ever been fortunate enough to attend a seminar or conference hosted by Don Murray or Dale Lutz of Safe Software will have some idea of the show that they put on. The 2009 FME International User Conference hosted at Whistler in British Columbia was absolutely no exception…it was informative, cutting edge and above all, great fun!
FME users from around the world gathered at the FME International User Conference from June 11-12, 2009 in Whistler, BC for an interactive and intimate opportunity to explore the theme “Bringing the World Together”. This year’s program provided conference attendees with a valuable opportunity to build their spatial ETL expertise, gain new insights into solving complex spatial data challenges and network with other industry professionals. A packed programme was available to attend which included pre-conference training sessions, 28 technical sessions, 4 hands on workshops, the quick fire ‘lightning talk’ presentations (I was delighted to present one on FME and Unifying the Spatial Environment, featuring access to GIS data from CAD via FDO, access to CAD data from MapInfo and, of course, FME Server) and opportunities to network at the lunch time ‘birds of a feather’ tables. If you had a troublesome task to complete with your data but couldn’t solve it on your own you even had the opportunity to pay a visit to the Safe Software Doctors Office where specialist consultants suitably attired in white gowns with stethoscopes at the ready were available to carry out surgery on your FME Workspaces!
Over 20 countries were represented by more than 110 delegates who all wanted to find out what is new in FME but more importantly seek out new innovative ideas for dealing with their data from examples demonstrated by their contemporaries. Networking is always a big part of Safe’s conference as it provides a unique opportunity to share ideas, successes, lessons learned and best practices. Given Safe’s unique place in the market you also get direct access to personnel from many Safe’s partners, some of the industries software vendors such as Autodesk, Pitney Bowes Business Insight, Oracle, ESRI, Intergraph, Informatica, Microsoft, IBM, Weogeo and many more.
So, for the uninitiated, what does Safe Software actually do? Well, they smash through your data silos to facilitate the free flow of data, that’s what. Interoperability is the name of the game and Safe have been playing their trump card, FME, for some time. With FME you can break down barriers between your data and your applications, translate your data into a more usable format as well as completely transform its schema to make it more fit for purpose.
As far as what’s new in FME… well, the list is somewhat endless. Those of you who have used FME for a little while will be aware that Safe do a very good job of listening to user requests and in the latest release of FME – 2009 – this is borne out by the inclusion of over 430 user requested features as well as yet more formats supported (225+) and even more transformers. The big news about FME 2009 though is that it has 20-20 vision! In general it’s 20% faster, and in some cases up to 20 times faster. In case you’re wondering how these numbers were calculated, they’re the results of Safe’s automated test suite which is run on every new build. Comparing the speed of the 4,000+ tests on FME2008 vs FME2009 the overall speed improvement was 20%. The ones with the most improvements – some of the raster reprojection and interpolation tests – were 20 times as fast as in FME2008. If you want to try it for yourself just go to www.dottedeyes.com/tryfme to download the latest version and give it a go. Don’t expect this to be the end of the performance increases though, at the User Conference Don Murray made the bold statement that every future release of FME will be faster than the last, irrespective of hardware, so we have some exciting times ahead or at least Safe’s development team have!
If you’re interested in forthcoming features then watch out for truly generic reading and writing and dynamic feature types in FME Desktop 2010. But, if your needs scale beyond the desktop and you’re interested in the benefits that FME Server can bring to your organisation you’ll be pleased to hear that FME Server 2010 will bring security as one of its most significant features. All actions in FME Server will be made secure to include Workbench access, web access and all APIs. It’ll ship with basic security and support for JAAS Authentication, LDAP security, Active Directory, Conterra securityManager and support for HTTP Basic and Digest.
If you’d like to know more about anything mentioned here or you have any specific FME questions on a wider topic feel free to email me directly at david.eagle@dottedeyes.com or alternatively visit www.dottedeyes.com/fme for further information on FME itself. Or, you can read Directions Magazine’s review of the Conference here: http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=3195
