The Quick Content task is a recent addition to Explorer, introduced with the 480 release in June. It provides a simple way to create your own Web-based menu for adding and displaying information using ArcGIS Explorer. The following video clip shows how you can access the task, and begin using it:

The Quick Content task is not in the collection of tasks you see when you open the default map. But you can add it very easily by choosing Tools > Manage Tasks. You'll see it at the bottom of the default tasks list, just highlight it and use the arrow to move it to the right hand available in this map list.

When you first open Quick Content, you'll see a sample page that you can use as a template.

Click GeoTagged photo, and you'll automatically zoom to a result location (in this case the ESRI campus) and will see a photo appear in the popup window.

How'd we do this? The Quick Content example is just a Web page, and it could be anything that we can display in a browser. If we look at the Quick Content source (right click in the content and choose View Source), you'll see that the link we clicked to view the photo references an NMF file.

To create the NMF file we used the Create Note task to add a note result, using the the photo of the ESRI campus in the note description so it would open in the popup window. With the popup window open, we exported the result, and put it in a location that anyone could access (also making sure the ESRI photo could be externally accessed).

You can create your own Quick Content page, then just paste your URL into the address at the top. Below we used a local path, but obviously if you want this to be available to others in your organization or extenally, you would need to place it in an location that can be accessed externally. When you save your map your custom Quick Content will be available every time you open it.

You can add your own layers, results, and even tasks to the Quick Content, even making your own complete resource center (there are other ways to link your own resource center directly in Explorer using your own home server, which we'll cover in a future post). 

A Quick Content task was also demonstrated during the recent User Conference Plenary, covered in this blog post.

For more information see the Quick Content Help topic.