Hi Folks! My name is Marco, and I’m the Senior Support Technical Lead for the Server Unit in ESRI Support Services.

Hope everyone had a great time at the UC this year. There were a lot of new and exciting ESRI products demo’d this year in San Diego. I just wanted to share with you some basic information about these new products that ESRI Support Services will be supporting as of…right now!

ArcGIS API for Microsoft Silverlight

Silverlight is a programmable Web browser plug-in that allows you to create animations, vector graphics, and enable multimedia in your Web mapping application. In short, it is Microsoft’s answer to Flex. The ArcGIS API for Microsoft Silverlight enables you to integrate ArcGIS Server and Microsoft Virtual Earth (now called “Bing”) services and capabilities in a Silverlight application. In short, you can make really functional and pretty Web applications that consume ArcGIS Server services.

During the Beta program, the Silverlight API has proven to be very popular, and we expect this to grow over time. Anyone that experiences issues with the Silverlight API can contact ESRI Support Services, provided that you are current on ArcGIS Server Maintenance.

For more information on the Silverlight API, hop on over to the ArcGIS Server Resource Center.

MapIt

MapIt is a product that allows you to create simple maps and is composed of a couple components. First, the MapIt Data Loader allows you to either load a shapefile into Microsoft SQL Server or geocode existing records in a Microsoft SQL Server Database. The spatial information will be stored using the Microsoft Spatial Data Type.

Next, you can create a feature service, similar to ArcGIS Server, that can be consumed by the Microsoft Silverlight API. Using this, you can create a Silverlight Application to do things like display all of your customers on a map. What makes this product cool is that you can embed your map as a Web part in SharePoint (YAY!).

The target audience for this new product is not existing ArcGIS Server customers, as ArcGIS Server customers already have this functionality and more. Really, this product is designed for Microsoft shops that have some need to map information but have not gotten into GIS.

This is a great opportunity to expose those places to GIS, get them interested, and show them how powerful GIS can be to their organization. MapIt will have its own maintenance contract.

If you haven’t seen it already, take a gander at some of the demos and videos on the MapIt Web site.

That’s all for now! Take care everyone!

- Marco B., Senior Support Technical Lead, Server Unit, ESRI Support Services