The flagship Microsoft mapping product, MapPoint, has been discontinued. MapPoint was very good at what it offered such as offline routing and basic business analytics, and will be missed by at least some users.
MapPoint and Maptitude have provided location-intelligence tools
since the early days of mapping software, but many MapPoint users felt neglected due to the two year update cycle, outdated demographic data, and limited capabilities. Maptitude, however, has had major software and data releases on an increasingly frequent basis.
Maptitude, developed by US-based Caliper, is proud to continue in the space vacated by Microsoft. Maptitude is a full featured business mapping application and is used by many organizations, including those that don't want their data stored remotely, or who need unlimited offline geocoding and address-matching tools. The Maptitude customer base also benefits from not having to pay annual/monthly subscription fees for cloud services because they can simply choose a one-off software purchase. With the departure of MapPoint, Maptitude (US$695) is the only value-priced desktop mapping software player left standing.
With the discontinuation of MapPoint there will be one significant benefit: business mapping will no longer rely on outdated information. When using Maptitude you will be using new data for new location-based decisions. Maptitude has the latest features and demographics, including the annual updates to nationwide counts from the U.S. Census and American Community Survey (ACS). There are many other benefits when you use Maptitude as an alternative to MapPoint, and these are compared side-by-side here.
MapPoint Europe and AutoRoute are also coming to an end. Maptitude can assist users "across the pond" as well as across the globe! There are now 22 Country Packages available for Maptitude, and Caliper is excited to be able to bring the power and flexibility of our Maptitude product suite to a global audience and to enable our customers to make geo-location based decisions internationally.
The retirement of MapPoint has a silver lining for your organization: a migration to Maptitude for more accurate maps coupled with better location-based analytics!
"I believe that Caliper's Maptitude continues to provide more GIS-related features and more flexibility in defining and presenting data and map layers than MapPoint does."
Steve
Hendel, Director of Market Planning, Office Depot