The ESRI User Conference in San Diego was a great conference to attend this year. We were able to see the new offerings from ESRI that will be available in November of this year. ESRI will be releasing ArcGIS 10.3, this incremental release will have many improvements as well as new offerings that IGIS will be able to make available to the UCANR GIS Community. These new offerings will include ArcGIS Pro http://pro.arcgis.com and Portal for ArcGIS http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/arcgisserver/extensions/portal-for-arcgis.
ArcGIS Pro is a new desktop application that will be available to all users of GIS within UCANR. ArcGIS Pro is a multi-threaded, 64-bit, project based GIS system that provides a fast responsive desktop application for the GIS professional. It will allow user to have multiple layouts in one document. It will enable the GIS user to have 2d and 3d layouts available in one project. It is what we as GIS users have been requesting for many years.
Portal for ArcGIS prior to the 10.3 release of the ArcGIS Suite was an extension for ArcGIS Server that had to be purchased separately from ArcGIS Server. In November Portal for ArcGIS will be available for UCANR to install on the ArcGIS Server and it will provide a user interface similar to arcgis.com but within the UCANR intranet. This will open up some interesting options for UCANR.
Beyond these two additions we will be providing access to a new open data extension for ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS for Cad. The open data extension will allow us to provide an open data portal where the UCANR Network and the general public can go to download our data for use in other geospatial technologies. We will provide the ability to download certain data types such as, shapefiles, kml, or csv files. The ArcGIS for Cad extension will allow cad users within UCANR to leverage ArcGIS resources with Autocad. This will allow UCANR to update our cad drawings of our infrastructure and have drawings with the proper coordinate system and additional attributes that are not available with Autocad.
Beyond these upcoming software releases and tools the ESRI User Conference was a wonderful opportunity to renew old and create new relationships with other GIS professionals and to see how others are using GIS around the world. I look forward to putting these new technologies in place in the next year and to hopefully attending the user conference again in 2015.