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I’m shifting my gears this morning and going to a session on ArcMap. I got a little ArcGIS Server overload yesterday so I’m going to see how much ArcGIS Desktop I can absorb today. You can always visit ESRI.com and view the “What’s Coming in ArcGIS 9.2” for more detailed info.

ArcMap 9.2 tries to improve the desktop platform (quality, documentation, productivity) and add some new things as well (graphing, animations, intelligent symbology). The team fixed over 600 “issues” and worked toward consistency to make sure that everything is the same among Map, Globe, Scene and Reader.

There are hundreds of new shortcuts for faster navigation. There is now a new “go to X/Y”, area and snapping measure tool as well as better scale control. As I said Monday you can now set the default relative/absolute pathing rather than per document. You can also set up something called “My Places”. You can pretty much figure out how something like that works. Unlike bookmarks, these are available in all map documents and you can share them with others.

Tables are almost totally different than before. As I said you can start working with attribute tables the same way you use Excel. The wrapping of fields is really nice and makes the tables so much more readable. You can now calculate area/length very easy on tables as well as hiding of fields and other Excel type functions (mimics how Excel handles spreadsheets). Plus you can finally add Excel tables to your layers. When you see Excel documents in ArcCatalog you can view the sheets inside the document much like you view datasets inside a geodatabase. Of course you need to have your Excel table structure set so ArcMap can read it, but you can set named range is complex Excel documents. So much like the sheet names, these named ranges show up in ArcCatalog.

New ArcPress drivers include HP Universal and EPSON Universal so you’ll have better result printing to the latest printers. Export PDF has been improved (the font embedding issues have been fixed) and there is now the ability to use layers within PDFs (big news for PDF exporters). Maplex has also been much improved with performance and adds leader line support.

Graphing support is almost totally redone. There are tons of new tools for creating graphs. There are better graph styles, the color can match your map documents, selections are synchronized for graphs and maps, pan and zoom on graphs and if you for some reason still want to use the old graph tools, they are still there. Graphs can also be used with time based animations. The graphs look very close to how Excel does them. There are wizards to help you create these graphs and the graph manager is much improved.

Animation has been brought over from ArcGlobe so you can now create animations in ArcMap. There is a new time layer animation type and NetCDF is supported. Just about anything in ArcMap can be animated (including graphs). Plus you only need an ArcView license to create animation (no 3D Analyst or ArcEditor/ArcInfo needed). And yes you can save out as an AVI.

Finally the Cartographic representations allow map makers to have more control and precision over their symbology. These are stored within the geodatabase and can even be published on the web with ArcGIS Server. These representations are a way to symbolize features carographically according to rules that you set. The simple fact that you no longer will have to export to Illustrator or Freehand to create high quality maps will save much time. The same data can be symbolized in different ways and map makers can choose which one they want to use for a particular map. Both versions are stored in the data and not in map documents and layers. They days of editing your features to improve the clarity of your map are over. The geometry stays the same and just the symbology changes. If you have specific ways you need your symbology to work, there is a SDK to create your own. You can even define any property in a cartographic representation from your attribute table (line width, color, rotation). The cartographic representation really changes workflows for ArcMap cartographers. Remember though you’ll need at least an ArcEditor license to create these representations. ArcView can read them though (similar to how ArcView can read SDE layers, but not create or edit them).

I had quite a bit of business realated matters to get to today so I didn’t get much time to go to any sessions or walk the floor. I hope to get back on track tomorrow. Still Planet Geospatial has done a kick-ass job of keeping me up to date even though I’m standing right here.

I did learn a couple things about ArcGIS Server. First if you want to do geoprocessing, you’ll need at least an ArcGIS Server Standard license. This gives you all the GP functionality of ArcView. If you need more, then you’ll need to go to AGS Advanced. Basic has no GP at all. The licensing is a little confusing for some still, but there is a good slide going around explaining it all. I’ll see if I can track that down and post on it this week. Even though they are combining ArcGIS Server/ArcIMS/ArcSDE, you’ll still get individual disks for all and licenses for all so you can still install them in different locations.

As for PostgreSQL support for SDE, lets just say they are still quite a ways away and even then I’m pretty sure there will be no PostGIS involved.

I’m heading out to the Open Source GIS San Diego Gathering tonight so I hope to see some of you there.

The default web mapping client looks great (AJAX, caching). You can work with multiple services at once. WMS, ArcIMS, ArcGIS Server can all be integrated (projection the fly and transparency) as well as ArcWeb Services. Publishing maps with ArcGIS Server is really easy to do. From inside ArcCatalog all you have to do is right click and select publish. Then you can open them up in ArcGIS Explorer. So if you’ve invested all that time creating your ArcMap documents, you can easily share them with users around the world with ArcGIS Explorer (well and ArcGIS Server).

(side note, someone should sell this service for users who don’t have access to an ArcGIS Server)

Of course you can still create custom applications with ArcGIS Server (and you no longer need ArcCatalog to administer AGS). The ArcGIS Server Manager looks so much more polished than what I’ve seen before (I guess we are getting close to the final release). The real power of AGS is the cartographic capabilities. The maps that get generated are just visually impressive. The online editing tools great. Using AJAX you can digitize right on the web client and they get added to your Geodatabase. (you can even snap to existing data layers). Oh and all this can be done with zero programming on the server side.

Replicating SDE between two different locations is really easy (Think Oracle and SQL Express). This can even be done over web services and ArcGIS Server. As easy as clicking on a Synchronize button, you then send the data back and forth. Our company has tons of small offices and sharing SDE Geodatabases has been quite a bit of work for us, now it is very easy.

Just as easy as ArcMap documents, you can publish models to the Internet right out of ArcCatalog. So from inside ArcGIS Explorer you can connect to these model services and use them. So agencies can share these models and allow others to use them (they didn’t mention but I assume you can use these in ArcMap/ArcCatalog also). Sharing models has never really taken off so maybe this will be the kick that gets it started.

Well I’m sitting at the plenary ready to hear what Jack has to say. The setup seems the same as last year, widescreens everywhere.

Directions and information are available at the link below. Even if you aren’t using much open source, meetups like this can be very valuable in your professional growth. Even if you don’t or can’t use open source GIS, you’ll probably have to learn how to share data with it. I’ll be there as I still have much growth needed in open source GIS. Remember it is a very simple trip on the Trolley from downtown San Diego.

Open Source GIS San Diego Gathering (OSG-SD) – Tuesday, August 8th, 6:30pm

It is somewhat hard to blog about Jack’s talks. I’ll just focus on some big points he made and leave some of the details for the rest of the week. First off Jack reiterated that 9.2 is the biggest release since 8.0 and apologized for problems with their software in the past. He then went directly into ArcGIS server and how it is changing how ESRI operates. While his did say that ArcIMS 9.2 was almost a total rewrite, he did compare it ArcInfo 7 being supported when ArcGIS 8 arrived. If you have ArcSDE maintenance, you’ll get a copy of ArcGIS Server Basic, if you have ArcIMS maintenance, you’ll get ArcGIS Server Standard and if you have an existing ArcGIS Server maintenance you’ll get ArcGIS Server Advanced.

It has been quite a few years since I was really amazed at seeing something demonstrated at the Plenary, but the new cartographic representation tools just blow me a way. Anyone who is using ArcGIS for cartography should be scanning the online training at ESRI for sessions because this is going to revolutionize how we make maps with ArcGIS. Bernie Szukalski demonstrated ArcGIS Explorer including some of the tools ESRI is going to provide to make publishing maps to ArcGIS Explorer very easy (and they will include some impressive maps online to get you started). Visually, the globe is looking more like NASA World Wind than Google Earth, very pretty (but of course it all depends on what you are serving up). Then Jim McKinney showed some of they ways to share ArcGIS data with other applications (GeoMedia, Google Earth) and how one can use SQL to update SDE layers from outside the ArcGIS suite. The KML network link right out of ArcGIS Server was particularly impressive.

Lastly Nick Frunzi showed the new ESRI customer portal. I was pretty harsh on the marketing team for not using ESRI technology, but the support team has really done a great job of giving customers access to their license information, shipping status, tech support calls and bug reports. I’m sure anyone who has tried to manage this stuff on their own will want to give Nick and everyone on the support team a huge hug.

We’ll be getting more into details later this morning so we’ll see more about the new 9.2 stuff an things that I’ve forgotten to mention.

• Keyboard shortcuts for tools (hit “z” for the zoom function)
• Better mouse roller wheel support
• Better context menus
• Customize Map Scale list (1” to 200’, etc)
• Limit Zoom to full extent (stops you from zooming out to the whole world rather than your focus area)
• Right click and identify any feature
• Sort the identify results (or hide fields you don’t want to see)
• Copy and paste right out of identify window
• Hide fields in tables very easily (just double click on them)
• Print attribute tables!
• Right click and calculate areas or length (no more vb code).
• Table navigation mimics Microsoft Excel (word wrapping also)
• Help now includes video tutorials
• Supports CAD documents symbology
• No longer need to set domains in geodatabases or grid size
• You can set by default “relative path” in your map documents rather than have to manually change it every time
• All ArcToolbox tools support batch operations (right click and hit batch)
• File Geodatabase improves performance over Personal Geodatabase (much, much faster)
• Flicker capability (rapidly turn layers on and off to toggle back and forth between datasets)
• Export to PDF now includes named layers (layers tab in Acrobat can now turn on and off the layers right inside the PDF)
• Native support of Excel (add Excel spreadsheets can be added right to the layers list of ArcMap)
• Support for archiving (see changes to geodatabase over time and even use the new animation tools and save movies out to show change over time)
• New graph support (Much easier to make “Excel Quality” graphs from inside ArcMap)
• OH I heard mention of using an Python script and R within your ArcGIS Model

I’ll be honest, I haven’t heard the kind of cheering and clapping that I’ve heard today in a very long time

Well we’ve all been able to geotag in Flickr, but according to this screenshot in the GeoTagging Flickr Pool, we’ll be able to do it natively. I don’t see it in my Flickr menu bar, do you? An astute poster points out a gap in the code that might indicate that they will be rolling it out very soon.

Update – Looks like TechCrunch has some analysis on the issue.

Update 2 – Geobloggers doesn’t help at all.

As the GeoRSS blog pointed out, ESRI is now supporting GeoRSS with the Javascript API. Andrea Rosso let me know that you don’t even need to go to that extent to load GeoRSS into ArcWeb Explorer. Just use the find widget and paste the GeoRSS url right into the search box.

ESRI is only supporting points right now and some GeoRSS feeds don’t work exactly right, but at least it is a start. If you want to use the Javascript API on your own use the location property of the AWLocation object that is passed to findLocation. I’ll post some code maybe later if I get a chance.

I haven’t been part of a presentation at ESRI since probably 1998 so I’m not really full of any hints. My suggestion to those who have asked is bring lots of donuts.

I guess though there are better resources than that, but I can’t think of anything better than donuts to go with my morning coffee.