Maximize Visibility

In today’s digital age, the visibility of your business is paramount. Once you’ve captured customer interest online, the next crucial step is guiding them to your physical storefronts. Azure Maps Store Locator streamlines this journey, offering an interactive and intuitive experience that leads customers right to your doorstep.

Simplifying Store Discovery

Creating a basic store locator using Azure Maps is already a straightforward task, involving the loading of store locations onto a map and potentially setting up a simple search functionality. However, for larger organizations managing thousands of locations and requiring advanced filtering options, a more sophisticated solution is essential. Fortunately, the Azure Maps Store Locator, combining the power of various Azure services, caters precisely to these needs.

We are excited to announce that we have developed a new and improved style for our maps across Microsoft. Azure Maps now utilizes the same vector tiles and satellite imagery directly as our other Microsoft mapping platforms, including our Bing Maps consumer site and more. This updated style introduces a fresh cartographic identity across Microsoft, focusing on enhancing usability, information clarity, and aesthetic appeal.

Key Features of the New Style

1. Style Choices: As before, Azure Maps allows you and your customers to choose from several styles, such as:
   • Road
   • Night
   • Hybrid
   • Grayscale (dark and light)
   • Terra
   • High Contrast (dark and light)

2. Fine-Tuned Colors and Information Density: We have carefully considered feedback from our previous styles. The result is a balance of colors and information density designed to make our maps more easily consumable across different zoom levels and device profiles.

Azure Maps Creator is a powerful product that transforms your static floor plans into dynamic, interactive indoor maps for your business locations. It allows you to overlay technical building plans ontop of Azure Maps, enabling the visualization of IoT data such as temperature, occupancy, and other location-based services. The onboarding process is streamlined, requiring only the preparation and uploading of your DWG floorplan files (the native file format for Autodesk’s AutoCAD software) into Azure Maps Creator.

In the evolving landscape of remote work and sustainability, the optimization of physical spaces has become increasingly important. Microsoft is at the forefront of this transformation, utilizing Azure Maps Creator to enhance the management of its diverse global workspaces. This product is essential for facilities managers, providing dynamic, interactive indoor mapping solutions that allow for real-time assessment of space and resources, quick response to critical issues, and seamless adaptation to the needs of a hybrid workforce—all while minimizing environmental impact.

Introduction

In today’s energy and climate crisis, prices for energy such as natural gas for heating and electricity have risen significantly in recent years, with prices at least two to three times higher than in past decades. This is particularly true in Europe, where affordable natural gas from Russia is currently not available. The price of electricity is also closely linked to the price of natural gas, so even when clean electricity is generated through wind, solar, and nuclear power, the price is still higher than what we are used to. This is due to the demand for and availability of electricity, which is typically high during the day and in the evening, but low during nighttime. When there is no wind or sun, electricity is generated by gas, coal, and lignite power plants, which is harmful to the environment. The mix of energy and the linked gas price drives up our energy bills.

While Azure Maps is known for great use cases around visualizing and interacting with a map and location data, you probably also need secure and reliable storage for that data that offers the flexibility to query your (location) data. In this blog post, we explore the different options for storing and querying geospatial data in Azure, including Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Blob Storage. Storing and querying geospatial data in Azure is a powerful and flexible way to manage and analyze large sets of geographic information.