What's New in CivQuest: Summer 2026

Public Mapping

Atlas

Headline Features

3D Map View. Atlas can now display your maps in full 3D with real terrain. Numeric data like land values, building heights, or acreage can be shown as color-coded 3D columns, giving residents and staff an instant visual read on patterns across your community.

AI Feature Extraction (Beta). With this new add-on, available as a beta tool, users can draw a box on the map and let AI trace what it sees in the aerial imagery, including pavement edges, fences, buildings, and tree lines, as ready-to-use, editable measurements. What used to take minutes of careful tracing now takes seconds.

A Smarter Measure Tool. Measuring got a major upgrade: users can now edit shapes after drawing them, snap to map features, undo missteps, and trace directly along real feature boundaries, even continuing across multiple adjacent parcels in a single measurement. Surveyors and title researchers can also enter deed calls (bearing and distance) to plot a boundary exactly as written, with running totals and closure checking.

Local Government Data, One Click Away. Feature popups can now connect residents directly to the information they're really after. New options include Parcel Insights (flood zones, wetlands, soils, historic districts, demographics, and elevation for any parcel), permit and code enforcement lookups, nearby citizen service requests, upcoming board and council agenda items, enhanced document search, and quick links to payment and records portals.

Sign In Once, Everywhere. Visitors can now sign in with their Google, Microsoft, or Esri account through one simple flow, and staff can use your organization's own sign-in system. Once signed in, a user's map view, layers, saved places, markup, and search history follow them across every device, so they can pick up on a phone right where they left off at a desk.

what3words Search. Users can type a three-word address (like ///filled.count.soap) into the search bar and jump straight to that exact spot. It's a fast, precise way to reference locations that don't have a street address.

Multiple Interfaces per Organization. Organizations with more than one map can now give each map its own complete look and feel, including its own title, colors, logos, links, and search setup, each with its own web address, while everything behind the scenes stays managed in one place.

Shareable Feature Links. A new Share button lets users send a link that reopens the exact property or feature they were viewing. Links unfurl with an attractive preview card in text messages and chat apps, and sharing works smoothly on iPhone and iPad.

Share Markup, Places, and Exports Too. Sharing now goes beyond feature popups: markup, saved places, and finished map exports all have their own share links. A shared markup link even recreates the drawing in the recipient's own markup list, ready to use.

Mailing Exports, Straight from Your Results. The new mailing export tool turns table results into ready-to-use mail merge files, producing letters, envelopes, and mailing labels as either PDF or Word documents. Owners who appear on multiple properties are automatically combined, so each recipient gets one letter listing all of their parcels.

First-Time Visitor Walkthrough. New visitors can be greeted with a brief guided tour that points out the search bar, advanced options, map and table views, and where to find help. Every step's wording is customizable by your team.

Mapping & Map Tools

Bring your own map data. A drag-and-drop upload window in the markup tool lets users add their own shapefiles, KML and KMZ files, or CSV and Excel (XLS/XLSX) spreadsheets of XY coordinates directly to the map, with a quick review step to confirm what's being imported. Uploaded features keep their original attribute data, so clicking any of them shows the details, and their color, style, and label can be adjusted just like any other markup.

Buffer from anywhere. Users can now create a buffer at a set distance directly from any feature popup or saved markup, with no extra steps, and buffers can even be buffered again.

A redesigned Nearby tool. The Nearby tool now offers a full set of clearly described location options: within a distance, intersecting, completely inside, or overlapping your selection, plus a "crosses" option for line selections. Each option is explained in plain language right in the picker, and the cleaner layout now works fully on mobile.

You decide what counts as "overlapping." A new percentage setting lets users choose how much of a property must fall inside their selection to count as overlapping, so thin slivers of neighboring parcels no longer clutter the results.

Better swipe comparison. The swipe tool for comparing two maps now supports vertical or horizontal dividers, precise arrow-key control, and a "basemap only" option so you can study imagery side by side without other layers in the way.

Saved places return you exactly where you saved. Reopening a saved place now restores the precise view, including rotation and zoom level, instead of an approximation.

A blank basemap option. Maps can now be displayed over a clean, blank background. It's ideal for focusing attention on your own data layers, and it's fully supported in printing.

Fullscreen mode. A new control lets desktop users expand the map to fill their entire screen.

More flexible redaction. Maps can now apply multiple privacy rules at once, each with its own criteria and its own set of hidden fields, giving you finer control over protecting sensitive records.

Search & Results

Richer search suggestions. Search suggestions can now show additional details, like an address or parcel number alongside an owner name, so users can tell similar results apart before they click.

Search connected records. Searches can now reach across related records, such as finding every zoning designation on a multi-zoned parcel, with results appearing everywhere from the results table to exports.

Clickable links in results. Fields that contain web links to deeds, documents, or external records now display as clean, clickable links, with the option to show friendly text like "View Deed" instead of a long web address.

Exports match your filters. Exporting search results now exports exactly what you've filtered down to, not the full original list.

Smooth performance on huge searches. Result tables now handle tens of thousands of records without slowing down your browser, with clear loading indicators and full keyboard navigation.

Complete dropdown lists. Search dropdowns now load every available value even on very large datasets, so no option is ever silently missing.

Smarter address matching. Address search now understands both spellings of road types (Way, Rd, Street, and more), so results no longer disappear as you finish typing.

Search respects your map's filters. If your administrators have filtered certain records off a map, those records no longer appear in search suggestions or results.

Printing, Exporting & Sharing

A faster, friendlier print experience. The print preview now appears instantly when switching layouts, and a new Customize Layout section offers one-click choices for legend size, north arrow style, and scale bar units, so what you see is exactly what prints.

Real progress and a cancel button. Exports now report their progress through every stage and can be cancelled mid-way, and your preferred print settings are remembered for next time.

Multi-page property reports. Property exports can now include multiple map pages, such as a zoning review packet with separate pages for zoning, soils, and floodplain, each with its own title and layers. Maps can also offer several export templates for users to choose from.

Truer, more complete legends. Legends now include modern tile-based layers, draw line symbols at their real width and dash pattern, and faithfully reproduce layer transparency in every print.

Direct aerial imagery support. Atlas can now connect straight to high-resolution county imagery services as a basemap, with full print support.

Print at engineering scales. Custom print scales now go down to 1 inch = 10 feet, with common presets included.

Speed & Reliability

Faster first load. Public sites no longer run a lengthy behind-the-scenes scan on startup, which removes up to 20 seconds from the first visit on large maps, and we've eliminated redundant downloads that slowed every user's first page load.

Your settings stick. Layer label choices, opacity settings, and map preferences now reliably survive reloads and stay in sync across devices.

Clear feedback when something goes wrong. Layers that fail to load are now clearly flagged instead of silently missing, searches show helpful messages instead of spinning forever, and selection results are always consistent.

Help that doesn't get in the way. The help panel is now a movable window, so users can follow instructions while working with the map. This release also includes dozens of small fixes across mobile layouts, popups, and date displays.

For Administrators

Compare test and production before you publish. A new Compare Versions tool shows administrators exactly what will change before promoting Atlas from test to production, covering organization settings, per-map settings, and map layer changes. An optional AI-generated summary explains the differences in plain language, with a one-click shortcut to promote when everything looks right.

Support & Operations

Compass

Headline Feature

Compass Relay: your scheduled tasks, managed from the cloud. Relay lets your team run and monitor the scripts and scheduled jobs that keep your data flowing, a modern replacement for Windows Task Scheduler. Define jobs with schedules as natural as "first Tuesday of the month," install the runner on your server with a single downloadable installer, and watch live status and logs from anywhere.

AI-powered failure analysis. When a Relay job fails, CivQuest automatically reviews the run and emails your team a plain-English assessment of the likely cause and recommended next steps, so 2 a.m. failures come with answers, not just alarms.

Organized and in control. Relay processes can be grouped into color-coded workspaces, filtered and sorted, paused and resumed without losing their schedule, and monitored with notification preferences per recipient, either all events or failures only.

Support & Requests

GIS Service Catalog forms. GIS departments can now take data and service requests through a structured catalog covering data by layer, map printing by size, and general services, with optional pricing that composes into an itemized request with an estimated total.

Attachment downloads that just work. Ticket attachments now download directly to your computer instead of opening in a browser tab, and a new "Download all" button packages every attachment on a ticket into a single zip file.

Flexible intake forms. Custom forms can now route submissions to your feedback queue instead of creating a support ticket, the right destination for suggestions and non-urgent input.

A better board view. Deferred items now have their own column on the kanban board, dragging a card between team members now properly reassigns it, and busy columns load more gracefully.

Easier invitations. New users can now be invited by email, by a shareable link, or both.

More useful feedback notifications. Feedback notification emails now clearly show the submitter's name and email, with a clickable address, so your staff can reply directly.

Tighter control of internal notes. Internal ticket comments are now restricted to administrators, ensuring internal discussion is never visible to ticket submitters. This is a deliberate security improvement.

Community Notifications

Notify

Notification previews restored. We fixed an issue that showed a blank screen when previewing a notification email before sending.

Powering Relay alerts. Notify's delivery engine now also carries Compass Relay job notifications, so status alerts arrive through the same dependable channel as your community notifications.