Category: Thoughts

I just got off the phone with Nick Frunzi who is the Manager of ESRI’s Educational Services Division which comprises Tech Support, Developer Support, ESRI Press, ESRI Virtual Campus, and our Instructor-led training offerings. He let me know that they have been following all the comments and have been taking them to heart. He was very sincere that ESRI is trying everything to improve service and that even they aren’t happy with their current level of service. I think the biggest problem with this incident is that it is very hard to ESRI to respond to all the comments on a blog especially if they don’t know how to get in contact with you. You can always use the ESRI support feedback form to let ESRI know what is or isn’t working, but any contact you have at ESRI can forward you onto someone that can help. Heck there are a couple of ESRI blogs out there that can also be a great resource if you feel more up to commenting on blogs than sending emails.

I told Nick that one of the biggest disappointments that I noticed in the comments was the lack of suggestions on how to improve. ESRI does hear from many users they are unhappy with the level of service, but users also need to let them know more of “the why” they are unhappy, or “the how” to fix the problems. I’ve always said on my blog that ESRI does listen to their users and I think that this is a perfect example of them doing it, so if you’ve got an issue with ESRI technical support or EDN issues, now would be the perfect time to let them know or tell your manager any problems you are having so they can initiate the conversation with ESRI.

I’ve gotten a couple emails from folks asking me what I thought about “Mapserver Enterprise” (The quotes signify that the will change soon). Well my company has been looking at integrating Mapserver into our products to replace ArcIMS in some cases, but with the announcement of Autodesk entering the open source community, we’ve begun to look at their product also. As a consultant, we always look for ways to help out clients and if Mapserver or Mapguide works for the project, then we’ll use it.

In the 6 months since we’ve initiated the Mapserver development, I’ve been very impressed with the community built around it and wished there was something like this for other GIS development environments. Tech support delays at ESRI has gotten to the point were we almost never bother anymore. I remember the days when you’d call and be able to talk to a support rep on that one phone call. Now it can be days before anyone gets back to you. The last couple incidents I remember were all resolved before ESRI called us back to help and this in spite of the ESRI support website being of no help whatsoever. It is tough being an ESRI developer sometimes.

Update – I think we’ve beaten this horse to death so lets lay off of the “ESRI Support Sucks” comments. If you do have good suggestions, though please do post them and I’m sure ESRI will read them. I have been contacted by ESRI so they are listening and reading these comments. It could be a good opportunity to talk directly with ESRI support management.**

It seems that many are voicing their opinions about ESRI Support and EDN in the comments to my last post.

What do you think of the quality of ESRI support you have gotten over the past few years? Good or bad and if you have any suggestions.

Leave them in the other thread.

Link – ArcDeveloper

Looks like the ArcDeveloper blog is up and running. Any GIS programmer should run out and bookmark/subscribe right now. I’m adding it to Planet Geospatial right now.

Link – ESRI Developer User Group Meeting

If this is an indication of ESRI’s understanding of the “developer” community expectations, it raises some serious concerns for me. Particularly for the Developer Summit. At this point, I’m putting my plans to attend on hold until some sort of agenda is posted so we know what we’re getting with this. We can’t afford to take 4 developers out of the office, fly them to Palm Springs, put them up, only to have the summit be focused on the intro level VBA/VB6 COM. And I’d expect that no other development shops can either. We are professional software developers, and I’d expect this summit to be aimed at, or have a track for experienced developers. If not, there is no way we can attend.

I know ESRI has done much in the past year to help developers, but EDN really hasn’t taken off as many have hoped and there really hasn’t been any community on ESRI’s side to allow developers to talk and share with each other. If you were to total up all the comments left on my blog about ArcWeb and compare that to the ArcWeb forums you’d see that there is pretty much nothing there. Last years User Conference is the last that developers at my company will attend and our hope is the Developers Summit will be worth it, but there has to be more to these events than just ESRI has done in the past. I’ve seen some sessions that might be offered and I’m hopeful, but past experience make me nervous as Dave is.

Being an ESRI developer mostly means you figure things out on your own rather than sharing and learning within a community site or even a real developers email list. I don’t mean to sound like a broken record but ESRI developers need RSS feeds on EDN/ESRI support, a real code exchange site (such as GotDotNet or The Code Project), a real forums site and a dev email list. I’ve had a couple people instant message me with developer questions and they just can’t find anything on the support or EDN sites. A very huge problem indeed and I hope all ESRI developers at the Dev Summit will let ESRI know that we want better community support on their end.

Link – Arc2Earth and ArcMap

Arc2Earth is really looking impressive Brian. I’ve just downloaded the latest beta and will hopefully give it a spin later this week when I have more time. Looks like it will be released just after the new year. Make sure you click on the link up top to Brian’s blog to see this great ArcGIS to Google Earth tool in action.

Link – FGDL Update Widget

Work with Florida GIS data? Check out this new Yahoo! Widget (Konfabulator for those who haven’t heard about the new update) that keeps track of the latest updates and additions to the FGDL. You can either download the data layers directly or view the metadata. Very slick, more organizations should look into these simple distribution methods (I’d still prefer RSS feeds).

Boy, get back from the airport, fire up the old RSS Aggregator and I see ArcWeb 2006 is “final”. I’ll spare you a link to the press release even though there hasn’t much press on the GIS blogs. I’m sure it is because most people don’t get the power of ArcWeb 2006. Guess that will come in time when people begin to realize that they can let ESRI host their data for them rather than worry about an ArcIMS or ArcGIS Server implementation (but you can even use an ArcIMS server with AWS 2006 if you wish).

Remember Konfabulator? Well Yahoo! has finally gotten around to changing its name and in the process has updated some of the widgets that didn’t seem to work really well with Konfabulator 2.x. Yahoo! Widget Engine 3.0 has all the Yahoo! branding you’d expect and make sure you opt out of some default Yahoo! check-boxes during the install or you’ll replace whatever search engine you are currently using. The new updated Yahoo! Maps Widget works well on my computer and it is very simple to use (just type your search string in the box and hit enter). You can download it from their new site.

Well I’ve got a kick-off meeting in northern San Diego County tomorrow and it should a fun project. Anything that combines Citrix, ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Server, ArcSDE, Oracle, Maximo, SDSFIE and some custom ArcGIS extension sounds great to me. I’m lucky enough to be close enough to California that I can get there, have a meeting and get home all in the same day. The Marine Corps isn’t on ArcGIS 9.x yet, but should be by the time the project is finished.

The only problem this trip is my ankle is pretty much shot. I have no idea what I did to it, but its really painful to walk. Of course the doctor couldn’t do much because the insurance company wants to wait a week before ordering a MRI, so I’ve got some powerful pain killer to make it feel better. I’ll spare you all my insurance rant (feel free to just use your own 😉 ) but I’m sure by the time I can get an MRI it really will be in bad shape and end up costing the insurance company more than it would have if they had just let my doctor do what they felt is right. I’m supposed to stay off of it, but I’ve been doing Christmas shopping and work around the house (I’m not one to just sit and put my feet up). We’ll see how much better it feels after running through the airport tomorrow.