Businesses often lose their way when putting location information in their applications. They veer off course when plotting routes for delivery people or nailing down territories in a mass-market mailing. Now, they can get directions from Microsoft.

The company on Thursday released an upgrade to its MapPoint .Net Web services, adding features and boosting the amount of available location data for both North American and European developers.

MapPoint .Net 3.0, which supersedes last April's version 2.0--Microsoft's first .Net hosted Web service--adds new data and new tools for developers who build applications that ping the service for information, then pass it along to users. It relies on the standard Web-service XML and Soap (Simple Object Access Protocol) technologies.

"MapPoint is a true XML service that's device and platform and programming language independent," said Steve Lombardi, product manager for the MapPoint group. "If developers can make an XML call from their application, they can integrate location data."

Using a Web service, rather than implementing a custom solution that brings mapping servers into the enterprise, makes for lower startup costs and faster deployment, Lombardi argued. "Before, only big corporations where location data was crucial, like FedEx, could afford to roll out these kinds of applications. Now small and mid-sized companies can."

New data in version 3.0 includes expanded street-level information for Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland, as well as selected cities in Ireland, Finland, Norway, Portugal, and Sweden. Closer to home, MapPoint .Net now includes more than 16 million listings for U.S. businesses in the 50 states and Puerto Rico; the previous version had a limited amount of such place data.

"Every business in every Yellow Pages is in there," said Lombardi.

The more comprehensive data, Lombardi said, allows developers to build apps for their companies that do more than just route employees. An app can easily retrieve locations for the closest copy shop, for example, then display the info for an on-the-road warrior who needs duplications right away.

Tools, not data, seem to be the story here. MapPoint .Net 3.0 adds several new features that should make location-aware applications a better deal to the enterprise. Maps can now be optimized for small-display devices, such as PocketPCs, other PDAs, and mobile phones.

"We had small maps in the previous version," said Lombardi, "but now developers can specify the output resolution to, for instance a 200-by-200-pixel display for the Pocket PC." Other minor enhancements include delivering road construction information to applications requesting driving directions, as well as multipoint directions. Version 2.0 only offered point-to-point directions.

The most potentially useful new feature, though, takes advantage of a technique and technology called "reverse geo-coding." Applications can send longitude and latitude coordinates to the service, for instance, which then returns with the closest street address. Cars equipped with a GPS (Global Positioning System) device could then inform the driver of the location of the closest hotel, for example, or detail a route from there back to the rental car agency.

Developers can integrate their company's location data into the MapPoint .Net service by either uploading that data to a secure extranet MapPoint provides, or by plugging in a MapPoint algorithm into their own data queries for such chores as returning ZIP codes for street addresses.

MapPoint .Net Version 3.0 is sold on either a per-user basis--costs run from tens of dollars per user per year to around $100, depending on the deal struck--or on a per-transaction basis. The latter's smallest block is 1 million transactions and costs $8,000.