ESRI User Conference 2009 Recap

For those who didn’t get to attend the San Diego User Conference in person this, ESRI spent some time putting on local presentations of the Plenary Session. My co-workers and I attended the one given in Bellevue today and came away quite impressed. T.J. Abbenhaus, Heather Glock, & Leah Saunders were outstanding in going over the highlights. The only thing missing were the freebies.

Quite a few things from ArcGIS 9.3.1 were reviewed although the refresher was nice. Besides the significant improvements to the ArcGIS Server rendering I think layer packages and ArcGIS Online (which Jack Dangermond described as “GeoFlickr”) are going to go over big. We’re going to have to start enhancing our FTP site by providing layer packages which include the symbology that so many users have asked for in the past. Also mentioned was an ESRI Business Solution named MapIt. This was developed by ESRI to take advantage of Microsoft platform & technology such as SQL Server 2008 spatial datatypes, SharePoint, Bing maps, Excel & Silverlight to implement GIS-enabled enterprise solutions. Very interesting.

Next up was ArcGIS 9.4 rumored to be available around the time of the 2010 User Conference. Many changes to the user interface will be introduced – most for the better as long as it doesn’t go “ribbon” on us. I especially liked the dockable windows (which don’t cause a screen refresh) and the addition of edit templates. The map book capability has been greatly improved. Other changes or additions include an open API to the file geodatabase, replication of SDE data (non-versioned and multiple schemas), a new mosaic imagery catalog, the inclusion of some features from Image Analyst (the ENVI rooftop demo was awesome), and the ability for non-licensed clients to view Maplex labels. An interesting Python script was also shown that allowed reconnecting the data sources for multiple map documents – very cool.

After that, there were introductions to and demos of the Map Templates followed by a short overview of the “Creating Effective Web Maps” seminar.

All in all, a fully worthwhile use of the day!

~ by bwsd on November 4, 2009.