Well another ESRI International User Conference and Homeland Security GIS Summit have come and gone.  Thanks to everyone who attended the Summit and/or public safety activities at the User Conference.  It was great to see you and meet with you and learn from your experience.  For those of you that joined us (and for those who couldn't) the materials from the Homeland Security GIS Summit and User Conference are now online.  Here are some of the highlights.

2009 ESRI Homeland Security GIS Summit:

• Cindi Salas's presentation on how CenterPoint Energy restored service efficiently using GIS after Hurricane Ike was really inspiring. Cindi also accepted the Enterprise Application Award at the User Conference Plenary on Monday.
• We were also honored to have Dr. Henk Sholten and Geodan give a presentation on how their Eagle system helps overcome some of the challenges facing disaster management. Dr. Sholten received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the User Conference Plenary on Monday.
• We received a lot of positive feedback on our collaboration with Microsoft on the Fusion Core Solution.
• Steve Mulberry's Technical Workshop on Tools and Techniques to Empower your COP with Dynamic Data was very popular.

2009 International ESRI User Conference:

• There are many exciting software development advances discussed during the plenary on Monday including:
• ArcGIS Explorer 900 - the presentation mode looks great for public safety.
• The advances with ArcGIS 9.4 and Map Automation are really exciting.
• The continued evolvement and development of Application Templates will be helpful for the GIS public safety community
• There were many public safety related lightning talks - http://www.esri.com/events/uc/agenda/lightning_talk.html
• You can search for public safety related paper presentations here - http://proceedings.esri.com/library/userconf/proc09/index.html.
• To get to the technical workshops you must log in with your UC account.

Also, special thanks to everyone that attended our technical workshop focused on the Public Safety Resource Center entitled Emergency Management Applications using ArcGIS.  It was a pretty full room and we got a lot of great feedback from you on the templates and good suggestions for directions moving forward.  Some of the suggestions and comments include:

• A special events template
• More focus on industry data standards
• Templates that help smaller units

Thanks for attending and we look forward to seeing you next year in San Diego!  Mark your calendar for next year's events:

                ESRI International User Conference        July 12-16, 2010

                ESRI Homeland Security GIS Summit    July 10-13, 2010