A couple of us attended the first AWS Dublin User Group last Tuesday.  We met some interesting people and hope it will help us maximise our AWS investment.

I thought I'd write a quick blog to summarise the main lessons we've learned since we first migrated to Amazon's cloud in 2009.

We are delighted to announce the release of Autoaddress 1.8, our most significant release since Autoaddress 1.0 was launched in January 2011.  This blog will provide a brief overview of the release highlights, the detailed information is available in our new support centre as described below.  It is important to note that customers will not be upgraded automatically as the new functionality may break existing deployments.  We have begun contacting customers to assist with the upgrade process.

New Products

Autoaddress Windows Client

Our new Autoaddress Windows Client application provides customers with a method of calling Autoaddress from existing Windows applications without the need for software integration. The application is launched by hotkey shortcut when the user is about to enter address information in an application. 

This blog is a second in a series of blogs describing new products and features that will be available in our October Autoaddress 1.8 launch.

Our new Autoaddress Windows Client application which will provide customers with a method of calling Autoaddress from existing Windows applications without the need for software integration.

Use a Windows Hot-Key combination to start-up Autoaddress Windows Client.

Autoaddress Windows Client It will detect the underlying application and select the appropriate ruleset to paste address information in the required format.  If a ruleset doesn't exist for the target application then a simple Wizard interface guides you through the process of creating one:

We've been a bit quiet lately with our blogs and updates, it's the usual story that we've been so busy with a major software and functionality upgrade that we haven't had the time to let our customers know what we're doing.  

We have a big launch planned for October for Autoaddress 1.8, and we'll release a series of blogs between now and then describing the new products and features.

This blog will give an overview of our new Account Centre functionaity.

The Account Centre will allow customers to administer their own accounts.  The main functionality provided is as follows:

Overview

We've had a re-think recently regarding our infrastructure environments for Autoaddress.   This blog will outline the issues and describe our new environment that will go live once customers have made required changes.

The Problem with Staging

When a customer is up and running it's straight-forward, they call our live production environment.  However, customers will generally have their own internal testing and staging environments, and want to call an Autoaddress staging environment rather than our production environment as they don't want to impact their billing/reporting.

Meanwhile at Autoaddress we view our staging environment as our place to hold the latest version of our code before it is released to production, allowing customers to regression check their code.

Inherently there is a conflict between the requirements of customer staging and Autoaddress staging:

All three live Autoaddress servers failed almost simultaneously, causing a 3 minute outage of the service.  We were poised to switch across to our backup service on Microsoft Azure Cloud, but the service was up and running again on Amazon before we had completed the manual transfer steps.

We have diagnosed the problem, which was a malformed address call that caused a particular Autoaddress component to crash in a less than graceful manner.  That would normally have only caused an individual server to be replaced without affecting uptime.  However the application that called the webservice was operating in batch mode to process a large number of addresses and had a retry loop that tried the same address 3 times if the webservice failed to return a valid result.

The application was developed by an Autoaddress Partner, and they have modified the looping behaviour to ensure that this doesn't occur again.

GAMMA, Pitney Bowes MapInfo partner in Ireland, are currrently testing our pre-release of Autoaddress for MapInfo.

There were a few technical challenges to overome when creating this .NET DLL integration, mainly around the single threaded nature of MapInfo Professional, versus the multithreaded nature of Autoaddress.  These have now been solved, and the solution works as follows:

Step 1 - Open a table to Geocode in MapInfo

Step 2 - Choose Geocode with Autoaddress from the Tables Menu

The following dialog will appear

First you select your table and choose your address fields.

Then you choose how you want to update your table, either by simply creating points for the table, and/or updating columns in the table.

Step 3 - Click on OK

We're finalising our testing on some new features, which are configurable via our Flags parameter.

CleanTag=Y

Presently, we clean the address and return a "tagged" Clean Address, but we don't tell you what we did during the cleaning process.  Specifying the CleanTag=Y flag provides this information in Clean Address.

As an example, let's say we enter the following address

8 Silver Birces
Dunboyne

Without the new flag, the CleanAddress will be returned as 

The following list of changes are being implemented in March 2012

Autoaddress have officially launched a new online address issues page for all users of GeoDirectory in Ireland.