Top 20 Takeaways from the Esri Partner and Developer Summit Conference
- ArcGIS 10.5 – a more significant release than anyone really realised
Because Esri didn’t say so until now. License changes, new product names (ArcGIS Enterprise), you need it to run Insights, its more cloud, big data, IoT ready. Esri are urging users to upgrade as soon as possible. ArcGIS enterprise is ArcGIS Server, Image Server, GeoEvent Server and GeoAnalytics Server.
2. “The Science of Where” ™ – Esri’s new brand http://www.esri.com/esri-news/arcnews/winter17articles/the-science-of-where-our-promise
This is big deal for Esri (and possibly all of us) as it is about making what we do (as GIS professionals) easier to understand and to enable Esri to more easily reach what they see as a large untapped market – companies that are yet to benefit from “where” and who are not aware that Esri even exists.
3. Insights for ArcGIS – Esri’s BI tool
You need Insights for data exploration and visualisation. It is Esri’s BI tool, and it is awesome already and only going to get better. You can link to spatial and non-spatial data. You can share your work in an interactive way. You need ArcGIS 10.5 to run Insights (including GeoAnalystics Server) as well as Insights licenses.
4. Big data, IoT, distributed computing, geo analytics
We saw some incredible displays of the big data processing capability using Azure and AWS clusters. Project Trinity was awesome (80 Azure servers). Questions remain as to how this will be licensed if you spin up and 80 Azure servers all running ArcGIS Enterprise! Distributed GIS or a System of Systems.
Example in demo: 2 million points were aggregated by space and time in 46 seconds.
Space and time cubes are cool – see here:
http://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/tool-reference/space-time-pattern-mining/create-space-time-cube.htm
5. ArcPro will reach parity with ArcMap later this year
If you are not using Pro yet, start now. Don’t do anymore development with ArcMap, use Pro Add-ins. New users should start with Pro and not ArcMap. ArcMap will be supported for years to come, but no more innovation will go into it.
6. Esri JS API v4.x will catch up to the 3.x version by the end of the year
It is mainly editing that is missing at present. The JavaScript API was one of the main focuses of the Dev Conference, with 20+ sessions and demo just about it. Esri will migrate all of their products and demos to 4 as soon as parity with 3.x is reached. 4.3 has just been released, release notes are here: https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/latest/guide/release-notes/index.html
7. Named Users @ 10.5 sees some significant changes
The way of the future regarding Esri licensing and 10.5 sees some significant changes. More are coming. Esri are listening to some of the feedback on Named Users. But the Esri licensing model remains as complicated as ever and maybe even more so.
8. Smart communities and smart cities, Geodesign and 3D – big focus
In terms of geography, Esri is really pushing this – along with 3D. 3D is going to become the norm rather than the exception. Smart communities was being pushed through their Hub concept.
9. Implementation patterns and trends
Esri are all about providing users with the ability to provide ‘quick wins’ that have immediate impact, show rapid results, have clear success criteria, and are low risk solutions. Configurable products like WebApp Builder serve this purpose, and enable users to ‘excite’ their stakeholders, and get buy-in quickly.
10. Portal Collaboration – sharing items between Portals
At 10.5 we can start to share content between Portals (via ‘shared’ groups) where a host server allows guest access. The use case is around sharing rather than replicating items between Portals. Whether this will take off with NZ’s relatively small Portal client sites is yet to be seen, but would allow, as an example, DOC to share data/services with MPI from a single source of ‘truth’.
To view the remainder of the Top 20 Read More >>
