mapping location of customers?

[questionname]

can anyone help with this please?

I need to map the location of customers at work.
There are between 100-150 all in London

I have looked at google maps but I'm not sure how secure it is.

I'm also not sure how to mark each customer on the map ideally I would like to put them in 3 or 4 different colours depending on what we do for them and be able to look at them as separate colours and all together.

oh and it needs to be free!

thanks very much

Erm... If you have a webpage on an internal server at work, or in a password-protected page, on your work website if it is hosted with some hosting firm, then only by viewing that page will a number of 'map entries' be shown.

As far as I know (I've not made use of Google Maps for displaying such a map) the data has to go from your webpage into the Google API at the time someone calls up the page.

Since only Google's application (to add the 'markers' on the map) will be given the lat/long/name for each customer, and they are being used by hundreds of companies already, then where is the security risk?

With companies showing properties for sale, bus stop and other transport-related data, and so on, do you think Google is going to store it all for fraud? Your data will be under 0.05% of the total data used in map displays, and only Google gets a list of the co-ordinates of your customers, plus your staff seeing the resulting map, of course.

Wikipedia does have some page about alternative map display services. I didn't actually look at that, went off in some other direction, but seeing no other responses today either, felt I'd post...

I've used AutoRoute to do this in the past. Also TravelManager. MapPoint I think is better at doing this type of thing. Problem with all those of course is that they cost - but may be worth looking on work's servers to see if they already exist.

www.batchgeocode.com is interesting. It takes a TAB or BAR separated file and produces a google map from it. I've just done a very simple test with 5 locations and it accepts UK Postcodes happily.

Once you have your data in a format that Google maps understands, you can then play with the coding to assign different coloured pointers. Trouble is you are then digging at code.

GPSvisualizer looks more complex but may do what you want.

Any webbased utility will be sending data around the net and may be storing it for a period of time. If you need something very secure, then you will need your own inhouse geocoder (the thing that converts the postcode to the longitude/latitude), plus something which takes the data and displays it on a map and that will be costly I expect (something like AutoRoute may be the cheapest, though may not fully do what you want).

Arcview does exactly what you're after. It's not free!

I use a combination of Yahoo!s geocoding service and Googles Map API to do this but developed our own tools to do it.. ..which is not what you're after doing (unless you've got some handy geeks?)

A real easy way of doing it is to use Googles Visualiser tools which are in the dev/code section. You typically just have to upload a spreadsheet to Google docs and select 'visualise' to show it on a map (can't remember exactly which option)

You'll need to do a bit of reading but it's dead easy.. ..and free.

code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/spreadsheets.html