Redesigned ESRI Support Centre Website To Be Launched Soon

Later this week ESRI will be launching a new and improved Support Centre website. Many are already familiar with the existing http://support.esri.com. The redesign will provide a much needed facelift with a new look and feel to bring it more in-line with the other ESRI websites.

The new support gateway will highlight all the ways you can contact ESRI Technical Support for help. It will be Search-centric and more tightly coupled with the Resource Centers. It will provide all of the information that is relevant to you on a daily basis such as announcements, common issues and support resources. We will also be showcasing some new community-oriented features, some of which will roll out this week and others that will be implemented by the middle of July 2010.

Since the release of ArcGIS 9.3.1 we have seen lots of content being published on the Resource Centres. This has been a great success and will continue. There are some changes to note though:

Much of the content you are used to seeing on the Support website such as, Knowledge Base articles, White Papers, System Requirements and Web Help are now going to be published within the Resource Centers (http://resources.arcgis.com/). Because of this change, we want to give you a heads up that any existing links or bookmarks that you have to the ESRI Support website will have changed, and you will need to search for the content on the new website. We suggest making a list of the knowledge base (kb) articles you have bookmarked or reference regularly, so you can use the article ID number to search for your kb articles. For example, if you have a link to a specific knowledge base article, copy the article ID number into the search box to find your content.

While it’s going to be a pain that existing links and bookmarks will not work, I think its for the better as the new Resource Centres are great and an easy way to find information. One suggestion would be good to have a redirector in place which interrogates the URL, pulls out the ID number and searches automatically for you. This is a very simple thing to do and will be very effective. 

So keep and eye out over the next week for this new look and feel to the Support Centre. Mike Hogan provided this information which can be found on the Support Centre Blog here: http://blogs.esri.com/support/… Keep an eye on this as more information will be posted on this new and improved Support Centre. You can also contact Mike via Twitter here: http://twitter.com/mikehogan