Location-based analytics or geospatial analytics allow companies to gain better and additional insights into their market and growth opportunities. This lets users make faster and more informed decisions. This can be achieved by integrating MicroStrategy with either ESRI Maps or Google Maps. ESRI Maps for MicroStrategy allows the user to deploy dynamic maps and perform rich geoanalysis. In this section, we will discuss MicroStrategy's integration with MicroStrategy.

Integration types are:

ESRI on-premises integration requires the user to purchase an on-premises ArcGIS server, or use a publicly available ESRI server. In the following section, we will discuss ESRI cloud-based map integration.

To set up or configure cloud-based ESRI maps obtain an ESRI map key:

Once you have the ESRI key, follow these steps to configure the ESRI map:

For this book, we used Tomcat on Linux. Navigate to the Tomcat bin directory in Linux and issue the following commands to stop and then start the server:

./shutdown.sh
./startup.sh

Creating reports in MicroStrategy for Geo-based analysis

ESRI map has following map types:

• The Marker map type is useful when the user wants an individual marker for each location
• An Area map colors areas based on their metric value
• A Density map is useful when the user wants to understand trends for many geographic locations based on the concentration of geographic data

Prerequisites before designing a document using ESRI map are as follows:

• To display markers or density maps, the user must have latitude and longitude values. This is achieved with either one attribute or two separate attributes.
• To display areas on the map, the user must create an attribute with the name of the location.
• At least one metric must be used if the user wants to use color formatting.

To create an ESRI map visualization:

1. In MicroStrategy Web, click Create | New dashboard.
2. Select the map icon from the Visualization gallery. If the Visualization gallery is not available, select it from the View menu.
3. Select the dataset needed for document creation. It can be an existing dataset, or data from an external source.
4. Click the PROPERTIES panel (shown in the following screenshot) and select the appropriate options for Map style, Map type, Map Options, and so on. If the PROPERTIES panel is not available, select it from the View menu:
   

5. Based on the map type selected, we can update the fields of the editor panel.

The following screenshots show different map types:

Marker map

The following screenshot shows an Area map:

Area map

Note

Note: We have used a tool called MapMarker to obtain the latitudes and longitudes corresponding to the states.