During yesterday’s ESRI Federal User Conference plenary and in a workshop this morning, the soon-to-be-released ArcGIS Explorer (build 1200) and ArcGIS Explorer Online were demonstrated. These new releases are forthcoming, and we’ll be taking a closer look at both in future posts, but here’s a few highlights as discussed at the FedUC.
The upcoming release of ArcGIS Explorer (build 1200) updates the currently available version with several significant new features. One of them is an updated basemap gallery, providing a variety of best-of-breed basemaps compiled with data from ESRI and major users (USGS, EPA, and local governments) and partners (such as i-Cubed, Tele Atlas, AND, and more). Microsoft Bing Maps for Enterprise,including aerials, aerials with labels, and streets, are now available for free, unlimited use, and require no additional licensing. The Bing maps are featured at the top of the gallery.
Also included are the recently updated World Imagery, World Streets, and World Topographic basemaps. The Streets and Topographic maps include detailed content, such as building footprints, elevation data, and even vegetation, providing coverage to 1:1000 scale in major US cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and others.
Users can also add their own basemaps to the gallery using new tools that make it easy to manage and organize custom basemaps along with the built-in basemaps.
Another significant new feature is the Analysis Gallery, providing an easy way to connect to GIS services without having to write any code or manage configurations. The Analysis Gallery makes it very easy to extend Explorer’s capabilities with geoprocessing services and models authored using ArcGIS Desktop, and served using ArcGIS Server.
Sample geoprocessing services from ESRI are available, so you can try these out and download the geoprocessing tools to host from your own server.
The Analysis Gallery can also be used to add and manage add-ins, including the large selection available on the ArcGIS Explorer Labs group on ArcGIS Online.
Other enhancements and improvements will be detailed in future posts.
ArcGIS Explorer Online is a rich internet client that works directly with ArcGIS Online and other server and file-based content (such as GPS files and text files), and features many of the same capabilities (like presentations) and look and feel of the desktop version. It’s built using ESRI’s Microsoft Silverlight API.
ArcGIS Explorer Online offers the same Bing and ESRI basemaps to choose from. It also makes it easy to create mashups by searching ArcGIS Online, the Web, or specific ArcGIS Servers, and share your maps with others using ArcGIS Online or by simply sending a link to your saved map.
More in upcoming posts, but the FedUC has provided the first glimpse at what we think will be very exciting releases of Explorer and Explorer Online.
2 Responses to New releases of ArcGIS Explorer and ArcGIS Explorer Online at FedUC
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I use ArcGIS Explorer primarily for the presentation functionality, which is great. My biggest problem with it, though, is the inability to adjust how data transitions between slides. If slide 1 shows dataset A and slide 2 shows dataset B, dataset A remains shown while the camera flies from slide 1 to slide 2, and then dataset B suddenly snaps in. It would be nice to be able to control what is visible while flying, or even allow datasets to “fade” in and out. Is this kind of improvement on the radar? Is it something that could be an written into an add-in?
Thanks for the comments and feedback. We’ve had requests similar to yours, and adding some slide transition capabilities is something we expect to do in a future release. Controlling the “snap in” of data is something you can do already using some slide capture techniques. The same is true for the fade in/out effects. I’ll cover these in an upcoming blog post.