The new ArcGIS.com from ESRI is officially online as a public Beta version. We have successfully moved from a dark background to white, as can be seen on the right.
ArcGIS Online Beta Screenshot
Apr 08
The new ESRI Support website
The ESRI family of websites have been seeing a lot of new updates as of late. The screenshot on the right is of the support site that ESRI offers, which hadn’t changed in quite a while. Notice the changes, including the lack of links to the web help (which has proven so helpful in the past to show people help files), and no direct link to the forums prominent in the page (it is located on the left-hand side navigation bar). Instead, people are directed to the new ESRI Resources site, which appears to be the new organization of resources for ESRI products. It is nice to see ESRI trying to separate the official support requests from the support resources, even though I am not sure which design will be more useful to the majority of users.
The new ArcGIS Resource Center
The new resources page, for those that did not notice it, is no longer on the esri.com domain, but rather moves to the arcgis.com domain we discussed in the previous post. In the meantime, arcgis.com is still under construction, which the “Coming soon” phrase over an oblique image of the earth. If anyone has any more insights to this, please do share them on the comments section below.
Nov 18
I have been lucky enough to organize a GIS Day ’09 career event at the university of Washington, joined by Harvey Arnone of city of Seattle, Marty Balikov of ESRI Olympia and Dane Springmeyer, freelance geospatial developer. The discussion was titled “What are the essential skills to succeed as a GIS Analyst”, and I have compiled some notes to help with all aspiring GIS Professionals out there. Feel free to add more details in the comments section as you see fit.
Oct 02
Many people out there insist that Google Maps and Google Earth is killing the GIS industry. I had a number of students circulate that idea with me, always wondering if there is still a future for GIS. In a short simple answer, Google Maps/Earth is not a GIS, and GIS will be around for the foreseeable future.
Mar 25
Coming from various discussions I have had in the GIS and ESRI Users groups in LinkedIn, I decided I should write a log entry describing the three technologies that people discuss frequently, without differentiation between them: the geoweb, web mapping and web GIS. While there are multiple definitions of the three, mine defines the three based on their functionality, differentiating them and drawing clear distinctions. Continue reading »
