REDLANDS, Calif., Dec. 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Longtime geographic information system (GIS) educator Toni Fisher has joined ESRI's Industry Solutions Group as the higher education manager, where she will encourage the use of GIS in building effective learning environments.

Fisher has undergraduate degrees in philosophy and environmental studies and a master of science degree in geographic information science conferred by Birkbeck College, University of London. Her GIS career spans a number of industries including forestry, telecommunications, city and county government, and mass transit. Working within these fields, Fisher was responsible for implementing and deploying GIS as well as training staff in GIS and GIS applications.

"One of my goals is to support institutes of higher education with enterprise deployment and browser-based GIS," says Fisher. "Many schools have ESRI software but are not yet taking full advantage of the learning opportunities that an enterprise GIS installation can bring to interdepartmental projects."

She adds that in these times of budget constraint, enterprise implementation is a key component to the efficiencies and cost reductions that can be realized with the use of GIS for administrative projects such as facilities management, asset inventories, and scheduled maintenance.

Michael Gould, ESRI's director of education in Industry Solutions, says, "Toni's comprehensive knowledge of our software and extensive teaching experience, as well as previous industry experience, make her the perfect person to assist higher education users in moving to enterprise GIS across the whole campus."

For more information about ESRI's higher education program, visit www.esri.com/university.

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Since 1969, ESRI has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS, ESRI software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. ESRI applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world's mapping and spatial analysis. ESRI is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at www.esri.com/news.

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