I have absolutely no experience working with GIS before. During a recent meeting, our client was bouncing around their complaints about how detailed our annual reliability reports were and openly admitted to just reading the covering letter and the introduction before skipping 500-odd pages to the recommendation section. 

They are looking for a means to visually represent the mechanical and electrical health of plant machinery which is not a major issue as we build a web portal with WPF dashboards, guages etc. which they seemed impressed with. However, because each building is multi-story they wanted a 'Google Maps' type interface control to navigate between building levels and ultimately zoom from floor --> room --> plant machine --> machine component. Again this is achievable through WPF controls but to get it to work we have to build each individual map from scratch. 

After searching the net... I ended up here. Most of the application resources I have stumbled across discuss working with existing SHP files and I am searching for resource that focuses on creating SHP files from scratch.