ArcGIS program manager Jim McKinney emceed the morning plenary officially opening the DevSummit. He introduced ArcGIS Explorer as taking a big leap from the currently released ArcGIS Explorer 500 to the forthcoming ArcGIS Explorer 900.

He introduced Bern Szukalski who began by highlighting the new ribbon UI, explaining that it made ArcGIS Explorer easy to use, and a great choice for delivering broader access to GIS data and GIS capabilities. 

Bern also showed how shared content found on ArcGIS Online can be used in ArcGIS Explorer, and Explorer's new integrated 2D/3D display capabilities. Much of the demonstration was similar to what was presented earlier in the week during the BPC plenary which was covered in our BPC Plenary - Part 2 blog post.

Bern also mentioned that Microsoft Virtual Earth aerial, hybrid, and streets map services, which are included in a built-in gallery of basemaps you can choose from, would also be freely available to Explorer users that also used ArcGIS Desktop. Standalone Explorer users will be able to subscribe to the Virtual Earth services, and these will also be available via ESRI enterprise licensing options.

Next Bern highlighted the new presentation capabilities by opening a pre-authored presentation, stepping through each "slide" (which was actually a live Explorer display). This was also along the same lines of what was shown during the BPC plenary, and we covered in our BPC Plenary - Part 3 post.

But then attendees got a behind-the-scenes look at the presentation authoring tools, as Bern created a few new slides by positioning the globe, adding captions and popups, and capturing the application state as new slides.

Here's one of the newly created slides showing the location of Alaska's Mount Redoubt, along with a popup window showing an MSNBC flash animation of how volcanoes form.

To be continued in Part 2....