The Business Geographics Center has a future that is quite promising. With the tremendous growth in the use of GIS in business applications, coupled with strong competition among GIS vendors to produce software that addresses the needs of the business community, firms are now demanding that the business student become GIS literate. This, in turn, drives university business faculty to provide the very best of GIS learning experiences for business-oriented students at all levels from undergraduate through graduate programs. The OMIS Department will continues to provide for teaching and learning GIS using Intergraph's GeoMedia® suite of GIS software products. This includes GeoMedia Professional--a major GIS data capture, thematic mapping, and spatial analysis product, and GeoMedia Web Map--for publishing interactive business maps on corporate internets and intranets. These products provides a number of features that make them ideal for the contemporary firm: Seamless integration with all major GIS vendor formats Complete set of spatial analysis tools Thematic mapping features Insertion of scanned maps, aerial photographs, and satellite imagery as backdrops Attachment of multimedia to map features by insertion of hypertext links as attributes Sharing GIS information across the World Wide Web Combining GIS data with text and spreadsheets A second piece of software that will play an important role in upcoming GIS classes is Microsoft MapPoint, one of the latest additions to the Microsoft Office family of products. We will be teaching the use of this software to perform desktop mapping solutions for business management and decision-making. In addition, we will be working projects making use of MapPoint .NET XML Web Services. Our standalone Business Geographics course, OMIS 679, was approved by the NIU Curriculum Committee and went into effect in May of 2000. An undergraduate course, OMIS 379--Business Applications of Geographic Information Systems, was approved by the NIU Curriculum Committee during the Spring 2001 semester and will be offered for the first time during the Spring 2002 semester. This new course will be an elective in the B. S. program in Operations and Information Management. A project involving a geographic analysis of the NIU College of Business alumni database was completed in August 1999. This project has been continued as a learning experience in GIS problem solving in our Business Geographics courses. Click on the Alumni Maps button to the right to see some of the results of this analysis. We hope to extend this alumni analysis to student projects that analyze the entire NIU alumni database, producing maps that would show patterns as well as trends that change with time.