Later this morning will see the kick off our annual GIS Senior Executive Summit 2010. This invitation only event brings together industry leaders and executives from a number of our client base and around New Zealand. There is a great line up of speakers for this years summit including the president of ESRI, Jack Dangermond. Other speakers include LINZ (Land Information New Zealand) and EQC (Earthquake Commission). Added to the speakers I have been spending the last week preparing some great demonstrations for the summit. This is around the concept of SDI (Spatial Data Infrastructure). Some wonder...

Next week ESRI will be hosting a seminar which will explain how to use map templates and other resources. ESRI will host a free, live training seminar to demonstrate how to use these valuable templates and other resources. Best Practices for Working with Map Templates will air at www.esri.com/lts on Thursday, March 4, at 9:00 a.m., 11:00 a.m., and 3:00 p.m. Pacific standard time. Cartographers, geographic information system (GIS) professionals, and ArcGIS Desktop users of all experience levels are encouraged to attend. Some familiarity with ArcGIS Desktop is recommended. Using the cartography,...

The ArcGIS API for JavaScript 1.6 is now available. This is currently live and can be referenced. Concepts, samples and reference documentation for the ArcGIS API for JavaScript has been updated as well. There are a few bug fixes along with a some new features. Some of the highlights of what’s new in this latest release include: Support for Dojo 1.4.1 Ability to rename Dojo namespaces Web Mercator Auxiliary Sphere (102100) In addition to the enhancements above this latest version contains various bug fixes to improve the stability and performance. There have also been some updates to the extensions...

Last week as part of the ESRI Federal User Conference 2010, ESRI announced a new and existing relationship with Amazon Web Services. Information on this announcement can be found here: http://geo.geek.nz/esri/… There were a few other notes that those interested should be aware of. Very soon we’ll see ArcGIS Server running in the cloud I think this is a significant development and a great move forward from ESRI. Initially ESRI will offer ArcGIS Server Enterprise Advanced v10, along with a few extensions, on AWS. “The ArcGIS Server Amazon Machine Images, hosted in the AWS cloud, will not be...

Many users wonder and ask about ESRI’s position on/and support for open source. As part of the ESRI Speaker Series a new podcast has been posted which covers this topic. Victoria Kouyoumjian discusses ESRI’s position on open source and the importance of open source software in GIS application development. Check out the podcast here: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/…

With the release of the ArcGIS API for Microsoft Silverlight/WPF 1.1 and ESRI MapIt 1.1, ESRI Parts for Microsoft SharePoint 1.1 was made available for download. ESRI Parts for Microsoft SharePoint 1.1 was a new product offering for those that wanted to integrate rich mapping functionality into their SharePoint sites. Information on this can be found here: http://geo.geek.nz/development/… The ESRI Parts leverage the framework SharePoint provides to offer interactive and configurable mapping components that give you a geospatial view of your organization’s data. The ability to visualize data...

Fresh out of the ESRI Federal User Conference 2010 that kicked off today in Washington, ESRI announced a new and exciting relationship with Amazon Web Services. As part of its commitment to support cloud computing, ESRI is collaborating with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to join the growing community of AWS Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) building services and solutions in the cloud computing environment. As users begin to think about cloud computing this new relationship provides a easy go to option. ESRI is working to make ArcGIS available via the cloud and working with the biggest cloud computing...

The TDC Group has been working hard on their latest offering called Freeance View. Freeance View is a cut down version of Freeance Mobile and like the other Freeance Mobile offerings, Freeance View is specifically designed for the BlackBerry platform. Now there’s no reason not to have your GIS on BlackBerry smartphones. Freeance View software allows any organization running ESRI’s ArcGIS Server to publish their maps live to an unlimited number of BlackBerry smartphones. And it’s free. Create GIS maps on BlackBerry for public use, field workers, executives – anyone. Whether...

Heads up for those ArcPad 8 users. ArcPad 8 Service Pack 3 is now available for download. The ArcPad 8.0 Service Pack 3 addresses specific issues in the ArcPad 8.0 product release related to international language support in ArcPad Studio, Windows 7 compatibility, and drawing performance. There are a bundle of new updates and fixes. SP3 addresses three specific areas: Issues specific to Microsoft Windows 7/Vista Support Foreign language support in ArcPad Studio Performance improvements A full listing of these updates and fixes can be found here: http://downloads2.esri.com/… Note that ArcPad...

Over the last few weeks I have had a few users asking for detailed security requirements for ArcGIS Server 9.3 running on Windows. As such I wanted to remind everyone of a whitepaper that is published on the Enterprise Resource Centre. This document provides a list of security settings required for ArcGIS Server implementations. Most customers will not need to refer to this document, as the default installation steps help manage these settings automatically. This document is primarily for customers who need to manually set security settings in hardened environments. There are four primary areas of...