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>>The issue is, not all of the client's users have access to the internet. Besides, when the service is hosted outside of your own network, what do you do when you cannot access it?? Phone lines cut, denial of service attacks, hardware failure are all issues that you can deal with if the service is losted locally. If it is an extrenal source, what can you do? Especially if the fault lays between you and the service provider.
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>>It is not like we need all of the functionality of the web service. Data is only updated quarterly. We want an off line process to generate the maps, we just need to send them to the client. The HTML version of the MapPoint maps do not allow for Zooming. We want the zoom capability. If every computer had MapPoint installed on it or MS had a plugin to view MapPoint files in IE there would not be a problem.
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>>Worst comes to worst, we may just have to generate extra maps to build the drill down but I was hoping to avoid that.
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>Well, I agree with you about the problem with hosting part of an application outside of your network, w/ all of the problems, and potential downtime if something is down between you and a service provider, but then again this is the 21st century, and we rely more and more on the Internet and a connection to it. If you don't accept the risks of the network being down, then you are going to lose some functionality, it is just that simple. I mean, you want HTML pages, but not all the computers are connected to the Internet? I mean, is each machine going to host its own web server, or you just going to have ppl go to a webpage locally in IE. You lose all server side scripting possibilities if you go to the latter, and in the former it would be a maintenance nightmare. You aren't going to get the option of doing drill down maps, in HTML, you can replicate the zoom in and out with Flash, but creating the Flash will take some time.
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>I mean you said you didn't a large budget for this, but creating all extra maps etc, or creating Flash will take a lot of time and it would probably just be more effecient to buy a product that is out there.
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>Morgan

The client's computers do have access to the intranet.

However, your point brings me back to the original question. Has anyone used MapPoint maps in a web app without using MS Web Service?