Background

The Enterprise Geographic Information System (EGIS) is used by all business lines to support the BLM natural and cultural resource mission. For this project, BLM was looking for a uniquely qualified GIS engineering team to provide analytical, development and infrastructure support across a broad array of GIS activities—including geospatial web application development, enterprise GIS infrastructure consolidation and enhancement, and enterprise geospatial integration. NexGen is supporting BLM with developing, deploying, and maintaining EGIS IT assets, and conducting complementary activities, such as: 1) providing technical support for Citrix and Windows environments, SQL Server databases housing Esri`s Enterprise Geodatabases, GIS administration, ArcGIS for desktop, Enterprise ArcGIS, and ArcPy, and 2) providing general documentation, analysis, and reporting support.

Challenge

EGIS improves the ability for BLM to manage and maintain its geospatial IT infrastructure through a consolidation of the governance, stewardship, management, and delivery of geospatial services across the agency. As the nation’s premier land management agency, the criticality of consistent, highly available, and reliable geospatial IT technical capabilities and services through the EGIS architecture is critical to the BLM natural and cultural resource mission. Therefore, it was imperative for BLM to secure an experienced and reliable service provider to comprehensively support the full range of EGIS requirements.

In addition, increased complexity is inherited by the need to validate the application using external access points (external firewalls) and multiple browsers. This added complexity requires configuration and deployment into a controlled environment that is externally accessible, yet protected. Heightened coordination with the network support team was required and greater understanding and familiarity with network rules, mapping, and protocols was necessary. The explosive growth of the user base consistently required augmentation, load balancing, and monitoring to maintain peak operational availability. 

Solution

The NexGen technical staff focused on managing and maintaining the various current and future EGIS environments. The team also assisted with strategic planning. To support knowledge transfer and provide reference for system users, NexGen's EGIS project team created and maintained  the appropriate and supported documentation. And, to ensure optimal performance, reliability, and efficiency of EGIS, our team identified and resolved operational issues that arose with the platform. 

Outcome

Our project team has successfully maintained the EGIS platform and assisted the EGIS user base for the past four (4) years. The outcomes of this project included:

• Supporting the growth of the EGIS Citrix user community from 140 concurrent users to 280+
• Adding Montana, Wyoming, and Eastern States to the NOC ArcGIS Desktop Citrix farm (This growth also required installing, configuring, and maintaining 10 new Citrix Servers bring the current count up to 18.)
• Performing multiple successful EGIS ESRI ArcGIS environmental upgrades to keep the business and user communities current with the latest technology and capabilities
• Deploying a public-facing web footprint to support ArcGIS server services and web applications
• Seamlessly supporting the growth of theWindows servers (to its current total of 53) required to support this environment