...to Everyone who visited us at the Spatial Analysis Island and attended our Tech Workshops and Island Demos. We do hope you recovered from San Diego and are excited about the new things you learned, the answers you got to your questions, and together all will make your work much easier and more fun.

As always, we also learned a lot from you, about what you like, or don’t like, or want us to do in the future. This is a very special time for us to live vicariously through the great work you have done on top of our work, and understand how to better support you.

Since you’re here, you heard about the just launched Resource Centers, the new gateway to all ESRI online resources. Here’s the link to ours http://resources.esri.com/Geoprocessing/ . Add it to your Favorites and visit the site often, especially the Geoprocessing Blog and the Model and Scripts Gallery [both under Community]. The Model and Script Gallery on the Geoprocessing Resource Center is a bit different from the other resource centers, in that it's not just us posting things, we're inviting you to post your work as well. Whether that be generic utilities or complete workflows for a specific task, if you think it can be useful for someone else, feel free to share it. I talked with several of the more prominent ArcScripts contributors from the past, who are pretty excited about having a more interactive place to post their work and communicate with their users. We have guidelines for submission, which include documentation of your model and script. When putting the documentation together, make sure you include any use limitations/restrictions – such as if it relies on an ArcInfo or extension licensed tool.

Regarding writing scripts, we saw noticeable increase in the number and depth of Python questions at the island this year. Actually, there were a lot of great questions and interesting problems to solve at the island, that have us pretty excited about some things we’ll be doing in future releases that will create a richer Python experience in ArcGIS for you (more on that in the future).

On the other end of the spectrum, we met a lot of new people at the Spatial Analysis Island this year who were attending their first International User Conference, and some who were quite new to the software. For many of them, the team enjoyed demoing ModelBuilder and showing them how to automate their daily routine. It was especially rewarding for those of us who had the chance to introduce many of you to ModelBuilder and hear you say: “Wow, ... I’m gonna use that every day.”

From the more experienced ModelBuilder users, there were quite a few posters with some very sophisticated models. We’ll be reprinting a few of these to decorate the halls around our new offices. Thanks for the nice work.

From the analytical side of the conference, all the interest seemed to be on statistics. Our sessions on spatial statistics, regression, and statistical analysis with Spatial Analyst were generally packed, and lots of in depth discussions at the island on applications of these tools as well as Geostatistical Analyst, and integration with 3^rd party statistical packages. We’ll be posting some samples to the Model and Script Gallery in the near future and working on some webcasts to share more about current capabilities and applications.

We hope you got as much out of the conference as we did, and look forward to interacting with you via the Resource Center until we meet again next year.