Insights into ArcGIS Enterprise, ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Pro developments from the 2021 EsriUC
The 2021 EsriUC wrapped up yesterday and my head is still spinning from everything I learned and experienced throughout the week! From the inspirational words of Paul Salopek, who is retracing our ancestors walk Out of Eden, to client demonstrations of grass-roots change being affected through GIS, we saw once again just how important and impactful our industry is. But what was far and away the most exciting part of the conference for me were the peeks at new features coming to our favorite solutions.
Here are some of the highlights:
ArcGIS Enterprise
One of the most significant developments in ArcGIS Enterprise is the new MapViewer, which has exciting new Photoshop-like effects for more powerful visualizations. MapViewer also allows users to hide the user interface to make the map full screen, more easily switch between layers as you style them, and have more charts to explore patterns and relationships within your data. The Classic and New versions will co-exist in the next iteration of Enterprise, so you’ll have the option of which to set as your default.
Esri is also investing heavily in Google Cloud and other cloud warehouses. They are adding support for the Google Kubernetics Engine, formalizing support for Google Cloud Storage (streamlining set up and configuration), and adding support for managed databases, with Google Could SQL and BigQuery. Other warehouses, like Snowflake, will also become easier to work with in the future.
The Kubernetes web adaptor will enable two-tier authentication or client certificate authentication, allow users to publish geoprocessing services to Enterprise consumed as web tools in Pro Apps and Portal, and support publishing image services referencing raster data in enterprise data stores.
Users will see improvements to Webhooks soon as well, with new webhooks being triggered when an event is edited, added, or deleted, or when a geoprocessing event is completed.
But the most exciting addition for me is ArcGIS Knowledge, coming to Enterprise and Pro, which gives you the ability to create knowledge graphs to visualize the connections between your data. With link charts, maps, histograms, entity cards and graph algorithms like centrality and community detection, there are incredible opportunities for new insights and analysis.
Please be aware that starting next year, the ArcMap runtime that allows for services to be published from ArcMap will be removed from Enterprise for security purposes. You will need to migrate your services to the ArcGIS Pro runtimes this year, while both runtimes are available. For information on how to do this watch the EsriUC session, ArcGIS Enterprise: The Road Ahead or review this Esri blog post.
ArcGIS Online
There are so many changes coming to ArcGIS online that I highly recommend you stream the session when you have the time!
Later this year, you will see new admin reports in ArcGIS Online that will allow you to see things like the number of credits that have been consumed and which users have been active over a set time period, and you will have the ability to schedule recurring events. There will be improvements to the partner collaborations and the organization homepage, and email verification will be added to enhance security. You will also have greater insight into what items are using other items, what layers a map is using, who is using a particular map or the map layers, and have the ability to create a custom sort for items in a group.
Next year, users will gain the ability to restore deleted items, search sublayers, and enjoy more capabilities to manage related items, and there are longer-term plans to improve the metadata manager.
Teams are working now to improve View creation with a real-time preview, and the capabilities to choose what layers to include and to add your definition while you are creating the view.
In the future, Esri will be adding the ability in UX to create indexes to improve query performance, make displays of polygon data in web clients faster, add the ability to control the z-order of features in web maps and continue to advance GC APIs.
You will see improvements in the dashboards, and the Instant Apps feature will not only include more apps, it will also suggest apps for you to use based on your data.
But my favorite developments? ArcGIS Analysis Studio and ArcGIS Image.
In the works now, the goal of ArcGIS Analysis Studio is to add analytics to MapViewer, allowing users to do data exploration, engineering, advanced spatial analysis, modeling and scripting on the web.
ArcGIS Image is image management and raster analytics run as a SaaS. There are more than 150 raster analytics functions and more than 20 raster analytics tools and pre-trained Deep Learning models included, plus streaming capability that will allow you to include images into all of your workflows.
ArcGIS Pro
Along with the knowledge graphs I mentioned above, I was excited to discover the presence-only prediction tool coming soon to ArcGIS Pro. With this tool, mapping where something exists now, and comparing the current environment to a study area environment, provides predictions as to where that something may exist in the future (like plants or animals).
The new animation capabilities are also impressive. Users will be able to set ripples on water, create realistic illumination based on movements of the sun, and add a variety of other visual effects that will help nonGIS users fully visualize and understand site data in new ways.
There will be improvements to tables, including new stand-alones that can be saved as a layer on their own or as part of group layers, and queries that can be distributed across maps.
The labels feature will be enhanced so clicking on an area of the map will cause the label to appear.
There are new pre-styled table formats and legend styles coming, and a great new geoprocessing tool with the capability to turn a georeferenced .pdf into a geoTIFF.
The full roadmap of future developments is online, and updated throughout the development cycle, so you can easily stay on top of product enhancements and release information.