With the situation which everyone is well aware of in Haiti, many organisations have been stepping up to help in responding to this tragic disaster. ESRI is one of these organisations. As part of a press release which has just been released, ESRI talks about the way they are helping assist in the Haiti earthquake response. ESRI is working closely with the geographic information system (GIS) community and agencies responding to the Haiti earthquake by providing software, technical support, GIS data, and personnel. In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake—characterized as one of the worst natural...

VMware has published a comprehensive deployment guide for ArcGIS Server 9.3. While this guide is focused on deployment it does contain a number of technical considerations to take into account during deployment. This document describes the best practices for running a typical ESRI ArcGIS® Server deployment on VMware® Infrastructure. It provides basic guidance on the architectural design of an ArcGIS deployment and the value of utilizing the VMware platform to provide virtual infrastructure.  It then discusses results of recent testing conducted jointly by VMware and ESRI characterizing the...

One of the new slick features of Microsoft Windows 7 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 is the ability to handle VHD’s. You can use them for a number of different tasks including archiving files and folders through to booting up another operating system. While Windows 7 supports VHD’s, they aren’t as easy to work with as uou have to use Disk Management via the administration tools to mount and unmount VHD’s. This can become rather painful if you are wanting to work with many of them and do this often. There is a neat little tool called VHD Attach which speeds up this process, allowing you to...

ESRI MapIt was announced at the Microsoft Worldwide Business Partner Conference 2009. This latest product offering from ESRI is a combination of software and online services that enable you to create simple maps from your enterprise data. I had a full write up on MapIt here: http://geo.geek.nz/esri/… For those users that haven’t been able to try it yet, you can get an insight into what MapIt is via a few podcasts that have been made available as part of the ESRI Speaker Series. A Conversation on MapIt Part I: What is MapIt? In the first of three podcasts on MapIt, ESRI’s Josh Lewis and Art Haddad...

For those wanting to get started with ESRI MapIt 1.1, there is now a step-by-step guide available. This guide comes bundled with everything you need including detailed instructions and screenshots. I wrote up post when MapIt was released around installation. You can find this here: http://geo.geek.nz/development/… This guide is meant to help new users become familiar with MapIt by understanding some of the common workflows associated with viewing your business data on a map.  The guide is split into four sections: Importing your business data to SQL Server 2008 Spatially enabling SQL Server...

The last few days have been interesting. I have been using Graffiti 1.2 as my blog engine for quite a while now and the time has come to move over to a better platform. Graffiti is a great engine but Telligent has dropped support for it and it’s basically dead. The product itself has been released to the world and is now open source. For those interested there is a new version available and this can be found here: http://graffiticms.codeplex.com/. Due to this I decided to move to Wordpress as my blog engine. Initially I thought this wouldn’t be that hard but its been a reasonable challenge to get...

Early last year I wrote up a post about ArcGIS Online and the move towards migrating its map services to the Google Maps/Bing Maps tiling scheme. Information on this can be found here: http://geo.geek.nz/esri/… Just before Christmas the ArcGIS Online Team completed this update and migration. ArcGIS Online servers were updated late last week (services.arcgisonline.com, server.arcgisonline.com, premium.arcgisonline.com), and the hosted ArcGIS Online map services were migrated to the Google Maps/Bing Maps tiling scheme in Web Mercator Auxiliary Sphere (WKID 102100). These map services may be used...

For those that have visited ESRI in the last few months you would have seen the newest building on campus. The new headquarters of the American software company ’ESRI’ in Redlands, east of Los Angeles, California, has been designed by HVIDT ARKITEKTER. The building has now been completed and is ready for occupation. HVIDT ARKITEKTER was contacted by ESRI’s owner, who had been in Denmark and seen some of HVIDT ARKITEKTER’s head office designs, and he was very impressed of these buildings The new headquarters are pretty stunning. We were over in Redlands in November for the ArcGIS 9.4...

In case you missed it a patch fixing the above issue is now available. This issue was identified late last year with ArcGIS 9.3.1 Service Pack 1. Details about this problem can be found on my post here: http://geo.geek.nz/esri/… The patch addresses the following issue: NIM052174 – Raster Catalogs and Feature Classes with raster fields stored in ArcSDE for SQL Server do not display after applying the 9.3.1 Service Pack 1. Description: The pixel data of a raster catalog stored in ArcSDE for SQL Server 9.3.1 sp1 does not display. Performing an identify operation on a feature of a feature...

Many users have been asking questions about ArcGIS 9.4 with some wondering about the dot release and the naming. Should it even be called ArcGIS 9.4? Well there have been some new changes.  The public announcement should be available soon but since James has already posted it here http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/2010/… you can listen to the podcast that Jack Dangermond recorded on this topic. ArcGIS 9.4 has been worked on now for over three years and it’s going to be a very big release. Larger than any of the previous dot releases and in some cases larger than some of the numerical...