Day 1 Morning Plenary Session At The ESRI International User Conference 2008

Updates:
Added some information on the ESRI International User Conference 2008 feel and keynote speaker.

The ESRI International User Conference 2008 has kicked off in San Deigo and information has been flooding in about what’s been talked about and shown off. Everything I have read so far is looking great!

I thought I would summarise the day events and some of what was showcased.

~ 14000 attendees attending the opening plenary session!

A view of stage with Jack beginning the plenary session.

Some of the notes from the morning plenary session include:

Updates:

From one of our attendees on how he felt the UC.

The conference appears to have a very Green feel to it. “GIS creates sustainable action” as a theme is being reflected every where. The key note speaker was an inspirational Botanist with a “fire and brimstone” message about living a humble life and saving the planet which erupted into a standing ovation from the ironically mainly US audience. Jack appears to be trying to steal a march on Google and promote “WebGIS” as a ESRI strength differentiating on our analysis capabilities along the lines of “essential infrastructure leveraging collective knowledge”.

Also something of note.

US department of the interior has offered free multiband landsat by the end of the year of the globe.

This is great for users that have been looking for this landsat imagery.

The top 10 countdown to simple things to improve usability in ArcGIS 9.3

10. Bookmarks are now accessible at the top level menu to make visiting common places faster and easier. Additionally, the bookmark manager has been redesigned allowing you to rearrange the bookmarks in the order you want, and you can save and load your bookmarks to a file to share between map documents with other users.

9. Pause labeling allows you to temporally suspend drawing of labels while you navigate about the map and perform other tasks. You can return to labeling with a single click of the button on the toolbar.

8. Keyboard shortcuts allow you to step through time series data; for example, just hold the ALT key as you turn on a layer and it turns off the previous layer, or you can use the same functionality to switch to a completely different map and a different set of layers.

7. Clipping a raster or an image to a graphic shape can be useful for defining a study area as a graphic shape-then use that shape to extract or clip a terrain model to your study area.

6. Working with transparent legends in 9.3-transparency is often used to improve the cartography of the map, when the brightness of the map does not match the brightness legend-there is a new option in the dataframe properties to simulate the layer transparency for all legends.

5. Regarding table sorting, aliases, and joins, there’s a new sorting option which allows for the sorting of multiple columns. Table joins now have aliases persisted-you no longer have to recreate field aliases after you perform a join.

4. On the Geocoding toolbar is a new option called the Address Inspector, which allows you to move your mouse and hold it down as you move around the map. It will automatically calculate the nearest address to that location and mark it and the address on the map. It also works for cross streets and intersections. For those who are using addresses and want to label addresses on a map, this process has been automated and streamlined.

3. On the drawing tool bar, you can now take graphics and automatically convert them to features. You can choose which graphics you’d like to convert, and they will now be converted to a feature class with all the attributes and symbology intact. This means that you don’t have to go out and create a feature class before adding feature-you can add graphics and convert them after the fact.

2. Identify shortcuts and HTML popups by using the identify tool to change the color of a building footprint. For example, rather than searching the TOC for a particular layer, you can now select a feature on the layer, right-mouse click on the identify properties and get right to the layer symbology. HTML popups can be turned on for any layer, and they allow you to see the attribute information in a nicely formatted window-along with a leader line, which always updates to the map location. This can be used for custom content like Web pages as well.

1. Quality is always a focus for ESRI but with 9.3 a new error reporting system has been implemented that allows users to send error reports directly and anonymously to the development team. The system also identifies where in the software a random crash occurred. ESRI has spent a lot of time reducing the number of crashes, but if you should encounter a crash, please send the report so we can continuously improve our software.

This top 10 countdown was taken from the ESRI International User Conference blog here: http://blogs.esri.com/Info/…

ArcGIS Server 9.3 was showcased along with the new API’s. The ability to have all your code client side with the new JavaScript API’s. Being able to view the source and copy and paste this into other forms.

The announcement of the new ArcGIS Server 9.3 Flex API. I posted about this here: http://mandown.co.nz/esri/…

Jack is saying the new model for web mapping is the GIS profess
ional publishing services and tools. End MASHUP users will tap into those services/technologies to create dynamic apps. Thus the amateur tinker will interact with those professionally developed applications to make powerful and nearly limitless combinations.

ArcGIS Mobile 9.3 was talked about and the the positioning of this beyond ArcPad. ArcGIS Image Server 9.3 was showcased with the ability to have server-side image processing.

Some of the information above was taken from: http://veryspatial.com/?p=2286

The morning session ended with ArcGIS Explorer Build 480 being showcased. Users talked about their experiences along with how they make use of ArcGIS Explorer on a daily basis.

When ArcGIS Explorer starts, it connects to a home server which by default are ESRI’s. But you can choose a different home server, and using your own you can control the startup map and tasks, the look and feel of the application, and enable or disable capabilities. Jami used a custom home server for Explorer, and had changed some elements of the skin; adding a custom logo, using a display overlay (for “ADOT Explorer’), a cactus north arrow, custom home page, and her own startup map and tasks.

A great user workflow was showcased.

Screen shots and information on how the Arizona Department Of Transport is making use of ArcGIS Explorer Build 480 can be found here: http://blogs.esri.com/Info/…

Following this Bernie Szukalski highlighted additional capabilities that were introduced in ArcGIS Explorer Build 480.

First Bern showed Explorer running inside a Web browser. Explorer can be configured to fill the entire browser, or just a part of the Web page, which was shown (below). It’s the same Explorer with the same features as when you run it on your desktop.

This is a pretty cool feature of ArcGIS Explorer Build 480.

The full write up on the features that Bernie highlights can be found here: http://blogs.esri.com/Info/…

That wraps up the morning part of the plenary session at the ESRI User Conference 2008.