Today in Broomfield, Colorado, ESRI opened up the doors of their beautiful CO HQ and hosted users, business partners and others at a friendly open house – this was a free event designed to introduce users to what’s coming and recap some of the highlights from the ESRI UC this past summer in San Diego. This was a great opportunity for those that were unable to attend the UC for whatever reason prevented them… if by chance you ever have such an event in your area make sure you take advantage of it. The team shared some details of ArcGIS at 9.4 and a number of business partners (like GeoEye, Cartopac, Merrick and many others) were on hand showing their solutions and answering questions… oh, and the BBQ was darned good too! Some highlights about what’s coming in ArcGIS 9.4:
At 9.4 we’ll see simplified editing to enable users to get work done faster:
- Improved selection
- Improved snapping to features for editing
- Loads of new search enhancements
- User contributed content will explode
- Simplifying and advancing cartography. multiple scale mapping and generalization improvements {a tough project we’re told}
- Generalizing in multi-scale environments
- Dynamic text enhancements, useful for map books where updates are given from the DB for labels, system information etc.
- Creating multi page PDFs eg.. Using python scripting via ArcGIS server then consumed via ArcGIS web service – imagine a dynamic online web map book ala ArcGIS server sending out formatted PDF map books to non-GIS users.
- Python becoming the accepted standard programming language for geographic sciences.
- and… multiple license installs.. nice!
See more about ArcGIS 9.4 in this feature from the ESRI UC
