Hello FME users,

Today is the day for What's Up Wednesday, your weekly FME newsletter.

User Projects and Case Studies

I noticed this week several projects and case studies that I thought I'd like to share. Interestingly, they're all local government projects and all from Europe.

From Sweden comes a report about how Botkyrka municipality is the first in the country to make all its plans available via the National Geodata Platform. With FME's help of course.

The report says:

"The goal of phase 1 has been to use as automated flows as possible to increase the quality of our internal plan mosaic, reinterpret its detailed plans into the digital format and make these available as open data in NGP... If any other municipality is interested in how we in Botkyrka have worked with automation in phase 1, I will publish the FME scripts we have produced including sample data on Deladigitalt.se before the summer holidays."

Tack for sharing this, André Jacquet.

In the UK, 1Spatial has a case study blog about the management and publishing of planning data for the city of Nottingham.

The case study details the technical side of things:

"Together with 1Spatial, the Council built an FME process that connects to the Oracle database sitting behind IDOX Uniform Enterprise. This queries, joins, and aggregates data from multiple sources to populate a templated Excel worksheet... and runs on a quarterly schedule managed by FME Server. The output metrics are emailed to a senior planning officer for sign-off before being reported to central government. This same FME process is also available as an FME Server Workspace App for planners to create customised versions of the report based on case officer, date range and ward."

If you prefer to read the full case study in PDF, you can find it here.

And finally, in Ireland, IMGS has a case study on how Monaghan County Council is managing their asset management workflows.

"The solution also leverages Safe Software’s FME Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) capabilities, which provides a dynamic reporting engine for generating detailed reports on an individual property or on assets across the entire portfolio."

So if you are interested, click the links to read those case studies in full. I personally love to read about new and innovative projects like this. Don't forget we have lots of the same type of story on our own website - plus the upcoming FME User Conference is a great chance to hear these stories straight from the users themselves.

Online Video Presentations

I also saw this week a number of online presentations available.

Firstly, all of Safe's World Tour presentations are now available online. Remember, day 1 was all about business decisions and ROI when using FME. Day 2 was the more technical set of discussions.

Speaking of the World Tour, my colleague, Dmitri, recently presented to Globema's Romanian leg of the tour on all things AR:

Dmitri always has the best demos and use-cases, so it would be worthwhile watching his presentation if you are interested in the possibilities of using AR with FME.

Another colleague, Evie Lapalme, recently published a video demonstration of "Automatically Enhancing Excel Data and Publishing to ArcGIS Online".

Evie helpfully runs through each step of the workspace that was used to process the data, including the ArcGIS Online transformers for Geocoding and Geo-enriching.

I didn't see any partner/user videos this week, but I did see a request from con terra regarding their FME zum Kaffee series.

They say: "Send us your topic suggestion for an episode to fme@conterra.de. If your topic is selected, you will receive the FME coffee cup 😀 from us as a thank you. We look forward to your ideas!"

FME Scavenger Hunt

Speaking of prizeworthy endeavours... the FME Scavenger Hunt is still ongoing. There have been 160 submissions now and one user from Team Zipster is leading the charge with 18 individual submissions. Can anyone beat that?!

Here is the current league table:

Team Zipster lead, but others are right behind them. There are so many challenges to do that any team could catch up. My favourite new challenge this week is Fun with Flags. Do you know what this flag represents? It's not what you might think at first glance!

If you know, don't mention it here. Sign up for the scavenger hunt and earn points for whichever team you join up with.

Oh... there's also a Team Safe taking part now! They aren't eligible to win the prizes, but they may be working their way up the leaderboard to challenge you. So keep an eye out for them.

Random News

• I see a new build of FME - FME Desktop 2022.0.1.1 (build 22350) was released for download just yesterday. This level of release won't have new functionality, but there will be bug fixes that might be useful. The WhatsNew file doesn't say much, but I'm told it's being updated right now.

• I see on the FME Hub a new transformer called the KoordinatesPublisher. Koordinates is a geospatial data management platform and this transformer uses the Koordinates API to publish Layers Tables and Documents to that cloud-based platform.

• On FME Cloud I also just noticed a message that says: "A new Unhealthy Server alert is now created when you launch an instance. This alert uses the FME Server /healthcheck endpoint and will trigger if part of FME Server has been unhealthy for 15 minutes."

• The theme of the FME User Conference this year is "The Peak of Data Integration" and Safe partner SBS certainly took that concept close to the limit when an employee climbed Denali recently:

Many congratulations! It's an amazing achievement to complete that climb!