Dave Smith has blogged about the first day “highlights” and I have to say I’m not impressed with the FedUC this year. Not much news coming out which is surprising since most people I know on the east coast are treating it at their UC this year (travel to San Diego is not happening for many people). The FedUC has always been more about application of technology than anything else so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that the big news is ArcGIS Explorer Build 900 being showcased.

I suspect the real news will happen at the Business Partner Conference and Developer Summit where we’ll learn more about ArcGIS 9.4 and get some hands on with ArcGIS 9.3.1. Maybe we’ll hear more about the new Silverlight API which I was thinking would have been shown more than it was at the FedUC.

I guess for now we’ll just have to imagine what this means since no one is explaining it.

…ESRI is introducing the concept of ‘layer packages’ which they believe will facilitate better data sharing. Layers referencing features can be packaged as an email or sent to the ‘cloud’ as a searchable data file. ‘To me, this is a big deal,’ said Dnagermond [sic]. Users will share the data and the knowledge acquired in creating their data. ESRI see users setting up a communities to share data but only those working on the project can have access to it. For those in secure environments this will be able to be used in their own back office environment.

the cloud eh?

http://www.hulu.com/embed/de7ie6dj36OHI34pFeWZiQ