Author: James

I was just thinking about the BPC and realized I haven’t even visited the site yet to see the schedule. All the buzz on the blogs is about the Dev Summit. Better go figure out what I’m going to check out for the BPC. I’d love to see some more on Image Server so I’ll probably seek that out as well as ArcWeb 2006.

I got an interesting email from a reader who didn’t want to be mentioned (something cloak and dagger no doubt). Anyway, he/she wanted to know why ESRI doesn’t get more involved with the GIS community. They acknowledged that there are a couple ESRI blogs, but nothing really engaging from any of them.

I’m not really sure why there hasn’t been more involvement with the ESRI folks on the blogs. I think there might be a couple of reasons. First I think everyone acknowledges that culturally it is very hard to blog at a company and I think that might be part of it. I’m not sure if there is any policy at ESRI for blogging or what backlash there has been from blogging by ESRI employees. I think the closest we saw was Eric Bader’s blog post gain a disclaimer and the fact he hasn’t followed up on it.

Blogging is a very large cultural shift for many companies and I think there will be more from ESRI in the near term (Brian Goldin mentioned blogs were coming soon from ESRI). I’m guessing ESRI employees will be more apt to blog on an internal blog service than they would be on their own as the boundaries are more defined. Some on this blog have mentioned Microsoft and Sun as great examples of blogging but they have been doing this for years longer than ESRI has. So while the blueprint is there, ESRI is taking is slow.

The second issue issue he/she mentioned was why ESRI wasn’t getting more involved with blogs. I can’t really answer that one either, but I’ve seen more @esri.com emails in comments on this blog and other in the last few months. I know Andrea Rosso has been commenting on this blog where we’ve talked about ArcWeb and others have chimed in also. I think if they could talk more about 9.2, we’d see so much more. Of course the other side to that is ESRI users are in the middle of 9.1 and while they are interested in 9.2, it really doesn’t help their production. We work with the USMC all the time and they are still on 8.3 and I’m others have the same issue. I’m glad to see Brian Goldin has said 9.1 will be the focus of the Dev Summit as most developers are working on 9.1 right now and things like the new Web ADF are really cool, unless it works with 9.1 it really isn’t any current value to us.

So lets see what happens at the Dev Summit with this new focus on community. You can be sure that developers are going to be letting ESRI know what is working and what isn’t working. I think we are all going to have a great time at the Dev Summit and we could be in for quite a change at ESRI because of it. Personally I’ve seen a change in my talks with ESRI employees so if they can figure out this blogging thing, we’ll all be in for quite a treat.

One of the more difficult things for us in our little office is to find a computer that we can beta test on. Because you can’t run two different versions of any ArcGIS product on one workstation/server, beta testing can be difficult. I decided to see how ArcGIS Server would run on Virtual PC and Windows 2000 Professional. The results are below, but since you can’t be shown the AGS 9.2 Beta, I’ve greyed it all out. 🙂

Of course I’d love to be able to use Citrix, but that just isn’t possible.

Its raining today, finally. After almost 5 months of no rain I’m so happy to be able to walk outside and get wet. My son seemed to have forgotten what rain was really like because he kept asking me why it was so wet outside and where it was coming from.

Somewhere out there is the backyard

And of course snow in the desert

So I was searching for any docs on how to upgrade an ArcSDE 8.3 to ArcSDE 9.1 on Linux so I put in the search term “upgrade ArcSDE linux”.

I’m guessing they might want to add some of those wonderful CamelCase product names ESRI is so famous for.

ESRI has begun to post some demonstration videos of ArcGIS Explorer. If you’ve been trying to figure out how ArcGIS Explorer will allow you to perform GIS tasks, this first show shows you a model (created with Model Builder in ArcGIS) for a site analysis looking at things such as slope and networks (I didn’t hear any sound so I couldn’t really figure out what the model was showing).

That said, you’ll see how GIS professionals will be able to leverage ArcGIS Explorer to allow them to push what was once complex analysis to just about any user.

**Update – **I’m thinking that ESRI should probably convert these videos to Flash movies rather than keep them as WMP. Anything to keep them more platform and browser agnostic.

Looks like MapQuest is backing their API with a blog.

http://www.openapi.info/

You might remember that Steve Citron-Pousty and myself are putting on a little “contest” Thursday night before the Develop Summit. If you are going to be around we’d love to have you drop by and meet everyone. We are still trying to figure out where/how to have the contest because we are a little unsure of how many people plan to show up. Remember there will be some “sweet” prizes for those who can display the “best” GIS application that uses ESRI products in some way. We’ll make sure that there is an internet connection, and projector.

All you need to do is show your best code and then you just might get tons of love in front of all the GIS “influentials” at the summit. Just respond if you think you’ll be there for the meetup and if you want to demo something. Remember, it doesn’t matter how polished it is or how good your speaking skills are. Just show something really cool and you might get a prize.

Brian was right, the tab showed up this afternoon. It is a little logically organized than the “regular” ESRI website for the Dev Summit. Remember, the main focus of this site is to allow you to leave comments for the presenters for each session. Just find the session in the list and post your comment.

Anyone check out MapQuest’s API? I’m not sure when it was “released”, but its new to me.

Probably big news since so many websites use MapQuest to show directions and office locations.