FME User Conference – day 2

Well, wrapping up the FME User Conference, I can say it’s been another interesting one. This morning Don and Dale showed us a bit about the new things coming in FME 2010, some of which I had already seen in beta’s or was revealed earlier in the event.

Certainly an important improvement is security on FME Server. This was not in place before and users would have to rely on other, 3rd party, ways to secure the access to the server. Now that it comes bundled with FME Server itself, it’ll be easier for the average user to set it up.

One thing I’m personally looking forward to to try out is the improved generalisation options that were mentioned by Daniel Pilon of NR-Can in his presentation about generalising a 1:50k topo dataset to 1:250k. This is something I’ve been looking into myself in the past (though a less dramatic scale range) and never really got far with it.

More room for improvement comes with the new 3D stuff that I have already mentioned. I think it will be a good idea to review the workflow for the Virtueel Apeldoorn environment and see if we can cut some corners. In fact, after 3ds and obj writing was announced last december, we have already started to look into those as a possible replacement for DXF in the whole process.