James Fee GIS Blog

So what does it actually mean?  Adding Virtual Earth tiles to ArcGIS Desktop/Explorer?  First off, this isn’t a free service.  The ArcGIS Online Premium Service: Virtual Earth Maps Collection will cost you.  How much?  Not a clue.  I’m sure it will be at a price point that will make some jaws drop and others will [...]

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I’m normally not a big blogger of press releases, but I know the crowd that reads this blog will be very interested.  I’ll follow up more later today with some thoughts about what this might mean for all of us.
Microsoft Virtual Earth to Be Offered With ESRI’s ArcGIS Online Services

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ESRI has released ArcGIS 9.2 SP6. All those who are unlucky enough to be working though the weekend can get ahead of the rest of us who will spend out Monday morning downloading and installing SP6 on our our workstations.
Me?  I’ll be on the couch all weekend watching the British Open.

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Last week I assumed one could access the new 9.3 resource centers, but it appeared that unless you were part of the 9.3 beta, you could not log in. Jason Stewart noted in the comments that you can now access them without your beta program login.

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For those who haven’t received their 9.3 release and can’t sleep at night without knowing what the package looks like, Jithen has some pictures for you.
ArcGIS 9.3 Arrives!
I’m wondering if the new packaging will be gentler on the DVDs as mine always got very scratched removing them from the cardboard packaging.

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Those who aren’t jumping on the 9.3 upgrade bandwagon can grab the latest ArcGIS 9.2 SP6 release available later this month. I’m personally very happy to see continued improvements to 9.2 even though 9.3 is released. Many organizations don’t upgrade immediately and making sure 9.2 is still improved allows those who aren’t ready [...]

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It looks like ESRI finally put the 9.3 help publicly and you no longer need a password to access it (HT Jithen & Mapperz).
Welcome to ArcGIS Desktop Help 9.3
The ESRI Resource Center is available as well. Unlike the disorganized ArcGIS Support pages, these are focused on the ESRI product you are working with. [...]

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GISUser.com has a news release posted that probably was meant to go out tomorrow, but “today” ArcGIS 9.3 ships. (HT Bill Dollins)
So now go bug your local ESRI rep asking them when it will show up.

Caption not needed

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The ArcGIS Explorer Blog announced that AGX 480 was released last night. I was wondering when build 480 was going to arrive given the May timeframe announced at the DevSummit. You’ll want to check out the “What’s New in ArcGIS Explorer 480” for all the improvements, but I’ll list some of the ones [...]

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My hat is off to everyone who had to work within the BIM (Building Information Modeling) space on a daily basis. Talk about using tools that aren’t refined enough (and this is coming from someone who has worked with GIS applications for 15+ years). It was painful hearing about how many hoops folks [...]

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I’m sure you’ve all seen news that 3Dconnexion released their new SpaceNavigator for Notebooks today and I’m not going to waste your time with another review of how “life changing” it is to find crap in Google Earth. I did receive a review unit from 3Dconnexion with the idea that I would look at [...]

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The ArcGIS Explorer Blog just announced that AGX build 440 is available:
The ArcGIS Explorer Team is pleased to announce that today, at approximately 1:58 p.m. PST, the newest version of ArcGIS Explorer - Explorer 440 - was released.
If the ESRI servers are your home servers, you’ll be notified that there is a new version available [...]

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PostgreSQL is about to get really integrated into ArcGIS workflows in 2008. First off we have ArcGIS Server Enterprise (ArcSDE) which will support PostgreSQL (ESRI and PostGIS data types) and now we have zigGIS 2.0 which will support PostGIS/PostgreSQL without the need for the traditional “ArcSDE” connection.
First and foremost, the zigGIS codebase will remain [...]

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OK, so here is what is happening at 9.3 with ArcSDE.

ArcSDE finally rides into the sunset. Even though technically ArcSDE has been replaced at 9.2, it was still a separate product. Now at 9.3 it will become fully integrated into ArcGIS Server. ArcGIS Server Enterprise will be the “traditional” ArcSDE level where [...]

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Announced earlier this month and talked about for at least a year (I think they mentioned this at the 2007 Dev Summit), ESRI is moving away from socket licensing to using the number of cores on the server.
Through November 30, 2007, ESRI licensed server software based primarily on the number of physical sockets on the [...]

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Good news for those who want to take advantage of SQL Server 2008 Spatial and ArcGIS.
ESRI’s ArcGIS 9.3 software, the next scheduled release of ESRI’s ArcGIS suite, will take full advantage of the new spatial technology in the upcoming release of SQL Server 2008. With the November SQL Server 2008 community technology preview (CTP), Microsoft [...]

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Brian Flood has a detailed post describing some of the new features of the latest Arc2Earth beta where it can embed Virtual Earth’s 3D globe in ArcMap. Now Arc2Earth has benefits beyond just creating web mapping from ArcGIS, but creating layouts that include 3D views (check out this screen shot to see what this [...]

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I get a ton of emails asking me exactly how ESRI’s geodatabase replication works. It is pretty slick to be honest so I think everyone who has SDE should probably learn more about it. ESRI has posted a podcast titled “Geodatabase Replication: Working with Replication that explains in more detail what geodatabase replication [...]

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This is clear to me:
FeatureServer + ArcSDE Data Store = Holy Grail
Being able to store data in ArcSDE, but still access it freely across any and all platforms. ArcGIS clients can hit ArcSDE and everyone else can enjoy data served by FeatureServer. But deep down this is even bigger than FeatureServer because really [...]

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There has been some discussion on my blog about the ArcGIS Online Data Appliance. Most ESRI users already know what is on the thing because they have had access to the ArcGIS Online Beta.
The ArcGIS Appliance provides terabytes of pre-rendered U.S. nationwide and worldwide data that you can host on your own secure server. [...]

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