ArcGIS 9.3 Error Reporting

One of the great new features of ArcGIS 9.3 is the error reporting system that has been introduced. Whenever a crash is encountered ArcGIS 9.3 will give you the ability to to send an error report to ESRI.

We have seen this feature introduced in a number of other software products out there and it’s nice to see ESRI has included it in the ArcGIS 9.3 release.

So why are these error reports important?

We think that error reporting can result in significant improvements in our support to you. To help us with this effort, at 9.3 all the ArcGIS Desktop applications as well as ArcGIS Explorer have an error reporting mechanism that automatically captures information any time that you experience a software crash. These error reports will enable us to investigate and fix many of these issues.

ESRI needs your error reports whenever a crash occurs. This way they can target the crashes and provide fixes quickly and easily to address the problem.

While ArcGIS crashes can be extremely frustrating, we want to encourage you to send us your error reports. Every time we can find and fix errors that you reported, it means that we can prevent the problem from re-occurring somewhere else in our user community.

Many of us have been wondering how this error reporting process works and what happens when you send an error report to ESRI?

The Geodatabase Development Team has posted a great little video which was showcased at the ESRI International User Conference 2008 that talks about how ESRI investigates and acts on all error reports.

This video can be seen here: http://downloads2.esri.com/edn/… More information on the new error reporting can be found here: http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisdesktop/… and here: http://blogs.esri.com/dev/…