One product which North Road had the chance to develop last year, and which we are super-proud of, is our SLYR ESRI style to QGIS conversion tool. If you haven’t heard of it before, this tool allows automatic conversion of ESRI .style database files to their equivalent QGIS symbology equivalent. It works well for the most part, and now we’re keen to take this to the next stage.

The good news is that North Road have been conducting extensive research and development over the past 12 months, and we’re pleased to announce our plans for extending SLYR to support ESRI LYR and MXD documents. The LYR and MXD formats are proprietary ESRI-only formats, with no public specifications allowing their use. This is a huge issue for organisations who want to move from an ESRI environment to the open geospatial world, yet are held back by hundreds (or thousands!) of existing ESRI MXD map documents and layer styles which they currently cannot utilise outside of the ESRI software ecosystem. Furthermore, many providers of spatial data only include ESRI specific layer formatting files with their data supplies. This leaves users with no means of utilising these official, pre-defined styles in non-ESRI tools.

In order for us to continue development of the SLYR tool and unlock use of LYR and MXD formats outside of ESRI tools, we are conducting a funding campaign. Sponsors of the campaign will receive access to the tools as they are developed and gain access to official support channels covering their use. At the conclusion of this drive we’ll be releasing all the tools and specifications under a free, open-source license.

You can read the full details of the campaign here, including pricing to become a project sponsor and gain access to the tools as they develop. As a campaign launch promo, we’re offering the first 10 sponsors a super-special discounted rate (as a reward for jumping on the development early).

The mockup below shows what the end goal is: seamless, fully integrated, automatic conversion of MXD and LYR files directly within the QGIS desktop application!