Microsoft Bing & .kml's for ArcExplorer

Microsoft is coming out with a search engine to rival Google. In typical Microsoft fashion, the product has been announced without actually being up. See the awesome (insert sarcasm here) video of Bing in action here.

So in part of my company's merger our Environmental group has included some new folks from other company's who actually understand the concept of GIS and its tool for presenting spatial data. So I've developed an ArcExplorer solution (our Google licensing is terrible) that will show graphs of each monitoring point that can be used without internet (by adding aerials of the project area to the .nmf). Initially, I was using shapefiles and trying to get balloons and data to show but in actuality I ended up using .kml files because they are just so dam good for displaying balloons and really easy to use. I don't even bother with exporting the .kml from shapefile. It's much better to just get the x,y's of the data points and export a table that and convert that using the excel to .kml tools that are all over the web.