11/18/09—Last spring, ESRI announced that it would be migrating its hosted ArcGIS Online map services to the Google Maps/Bing Maps tiling scheme. This migration is expected to be completed in December 2009. This change is in response to feedback from many ArcGIS users who have requested that ESRI use a common map tiling scheme matching other ...

11/12/09–Here's a little known technique the ArcGIS Content team sometimes uses when working with cached map services in ArcMap 9.3.1. Suppose your area of interest is along the border of the U.S. and Mexico. You prefer the cartography in the ArcGIS Online ESRI World Street Map service, but you need the detailed Mexico streets that are ...

11/05/09–Add-ins are used to extend ArcGIS Explorer's capabilities and can be created using Visual Studio and the ArcGIS Explorer SDK. The ArcGIS Explorer team has published a variety of ready-to-use add-ins that you can download from the ArcGIS Explorer Labs group.   See the ArcGIS Explorer blog for a closer look at how you can use ...

11/03/09–ArcGIS Online maps, tasks, and APIs received some good press coverage in October. Here are excerpts from a few of the articles: From the ESRI press release, ESRI Brings GIS to the Public with Mapping for Everyone Web Site ESRI has launched a Web site that allows users to create maps for free with simple geographic information system ...

10/29/09–In a post last week, we answered some of the functionality questions we didn't get to during our live training seminar. Today, we'll address the audience's questions about ArcGIS Online groups. Can groups be private?Yes. When you create a group, you decide to make it public or private. You can change the type of group later on if ...

10/22/09–Is World Places Locator really as limited as it seems? This question was posted to the ArcGIS Online forums by a user who is in the process of migrating from the old ArcWeb Services ESRI Place Finder Sample to the new World Places Locator available through ArcGIS Online. We posed the user's questions to Vivek Gupta, a product engineer ...

10/20/09–As we mentioned in last week's post about our live training seminar, we had about 150 questions from the audience. Because we couldn't get to most of them, we promised we'd answer some of them in later posts. Today, we'll address a few of the functionality questions. First though, the answer to an important general question: Is this ...

10/15/09–In a previous post, we showed you how to find items published during a given time frame. Here's another search tip. You can narrow results by excluding a keyword. There is a caveat with this tip: you need to exclude keywords in conjunction with another filter. For example, if you want to see all types of layers except layer packages, ...

ArcGIS Online, now in public beta, is a destination that offers a lot to the GIS users who choose to visit. The site is a rich content source for GIS data, maps, and tools; it offers tools for quickly creating a Web map, and it's a venue for sharing your GIS work and collaborating with other GIS users. The collaboration piece is ...

10/13/09–Last Thursday, we had more than 1800 users participate in our live training seminar. Here are some quick facts about the attendees who filled out a post-seminar survey: Over half had never used the ArcGIS Online sharing application before.   After listening to the seminar, everybody thought they would use the application ...