Geospatially Enabled OCHRE
By Sandra Schloen, March 2016
OCHRE embeds GIS functionality via the Java SDK (Software Development Kit) provided by ESRI. Note that since ESRI does not support GIS features under Java on Mac OS computers, the geospatially-enabled version of OCHRE is only available under Windows. The OCHRE app is licensed under the Basic level from ESRI which limits certain functionality but which does not incur any extra costs for users. The available feature set is sufficient for most of what the OCHRE user community currently needs; if it ever becomes necessary, we can reconsider which license to use.
Initializing the Geospatially-Enabled OCHRE (GEO) Version
In order to use the geospatial features of OCHRE you must first run the Initialize GEO process available on your Users account. This creates a special run-time folder on your computer that is needed by the ESRI features. You must perform this initialization on every computer on which you wish to use the GEO version (not just once for your user account).
Note, too, that this initialization process is different depending on whether you are using a 32-bit version of Java or a 64-bit version. When using geospatial features in OCHRE we recommend that you use a high-memory allocation version of OCHRE for improved performance. This requires a 64-bit version of Java. If you switch from a 32-bit version of Java to a 64-bit version then you will need to re-run the Initialize GEO process.
To determine whether your computer is already set to run the GEO, use the Verify GEO feature, also available on your Users account. This will check your system settings and determine whether or not the necessary initialization has already been done successfully.
If OCHRE has not been geospatially enabled, all mapping and related features will be gracefully disabled.