Jasper County, Iowa Chooses beacon™ Online Portal From Schneider For Property Information

JASPER COUNTY, Iowa – (January 7, 2010) – Jasper County, Iowa has selected the beacon™ online portal from The Schneider Corporation to provide up-to-date property information and GIS data to assist government employees and residents with easy access to important information. The Jasper County Board of Supervisors selected beacon™, recognizing how valuable beacon™ would be to the public as well as to Jasper County employees.

Jasper County's beacon™ portal features a publicly available site that includes important property tax and assessment information generated from local government databases, as well as in-depth search capabilities and robust property reports. The beacon™ portal also provides users the ability to view an interactive map of the County’s GIS data and aerial photography paired with a convenient tool set to assist in collecting specific parcel information.

"The beacon™ system will allow our office to place all relevant property tax information online. It will be of great convenience to the local Realtors, Abstractors, Mortgage Lenders and the general public. We strive to make all of our information public and easily accessible. This system will go a long way towards achieving that goal," said Doug Bishop, Jasper County treasurer.

The beacon™ site is a great benefit to the citizens of Jasper County, employees and businesses,” said Sue Pickett, of the Jasper County GIS Department. "This system streamlines how the public interfaces with the county by consolidating searches of multiple sites into just one query that can be conducted from any computer. The result is a more efficient way to obtain up-to-date information on properties, as well as providing search, reporting and printer-friendly features."

Pickett feels that beacon™ will save the county time and money by enticing residents to self-service many of their requests from home or work.

"The beacon™ website will be very useful to me in working with cities and their creation of urban renewal areas," said Carol Kielly, assistant finance director, auditor's office. "I will be able to more quickly determine if the legal description is correct. It also will be easier to identify each individual parcel within the new area."

beacon™ is designed and continually developed with its users in mind. No detail or feature is implemented without careful consideration of usability and maneuverability. This is done to ensure a very simple and easily understood process for requesting data from the site. Because all set-up, development, hosting and maintenance tasks are handled by Schneider, Jasper County did not need to purchase additional equipment. beacon™ has been designed with a component-based architecture, which allows for rapid deployment.

To learn more about beacon™ and how it will benefit the county as well as its users, please contact the Jasper County GIS office at (641) 792-6437.

The Schneider Corporation hosts similar sites for more than 120 organizations across the Midwest, including nearly 40 additional counties in Iowa. For information on these sites, please visit http://www.beacongis.com or http://beacon.schneidercorp.com.

About The Schneider Corporation

The Schneider Corporation creates value for clients by engineering solutions to solve their problems. We have expertise in engineering, surveying, architecture and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which allows us to offer an integrated approach to complex projects. Customers include both private and public organizations in industries including energy, commercial, corporate, federal, state and local government, academic and residential. The Schneider Corporation has been providing GIS solutions since 1989 to hundreds of county, municipal, state, federal and private entities. In a 2009 National Customer Satisfaction survey virtually all Schneider GIS customers responding to the survey rated Schneider’s customer service, product and service quality, and project execution as exceptional. For more information about Schneider, please visit http://www.schneidercorp.com. For more information about beacon™, please visit http://www.gis.schneidercorp.com.