Craig,
I'm not sure about extracting the heat maps and republishing, but you might be able to do something useful with the following setup:
- Go into WCS Administration -- AAA -- Groups -- User Defined {1,2,3, or 4}
- Scroll to the bottom to the Maps section. Put a checkbox next to Maps Read Only; all other boxes are unchecked
- Create a user and add them only to the User Defined group you modified
- Log in as the user. Modify the dashboard by deleting all pre-built tabs. Make a new tab and add the Coverage Areas dashlet to it.
- The default view when this user logs in will be Coverage Areas. The user can click on a coverage area that pertains to them. They won't be able to do much else.
IMO, this isn't the cleanest way to pull this off since the user unfamiliar with NCS will still be able to see the clutter from all of the normal administrative menus and other clickable content that they can't use. They'll receive a permission denied warning for just about everything they try to do with the exception of viewing maps.
Still, this may give you something else to play around with. If you come up with a good way of doing this, please post back as I'm sure there are quite a few admins out there that would like to see this functionality.
Justin