Travis Ormsby is on the left and Travis Saladino is on the right.
Travis and I have been conversing for a while about some of the bigger theory topics in ArcGIS Enterprise and the trouble many folks have with understanding them. We decided it would be helpful to share the outcome of these conversations. But there is a catch, what’s the best way to talk about these concepts?
One thing that Travis and I have experienced, and I’ve heard from our learners too, is that it can be challenging to learn the GIS vocabulary. Because at Esri, like everyone else, we are limited by the words in our language, we sometimes use the same word in different contexts to mean different things. Some examples of words like this are enterprise, service, server, layer, map, federation, or hosted. One thing we can try to do is to help you feel more comfortable with these terms and the context in which we use them.
To this end, we decided to collaborate on a series of blog articles to provide a narrative discussion about these ArcGIS Enterprise topics. We are thinking about even trying some analogies that can help relate these technical concepts to non-technical everyday experiences. Travis has already published some early attempts that are available from the Esri Training Matters blogs on the Esri Community site at https://community.esri.com/t5/esri-training-blog/bg-p/esri-training-blog. There’s one about how ArcGIS Enterprise is like a car and another series relating ArcGIS Server to a GIS office in a box, you should check them out.
Before we continue with our series though, we would like to tell you a bit about ourselves and maybe set the tone of this series. We both work in the Minneapolis regional office, and at one time were both ArcGIS Enterprise instructors. As you can tell from the picture above, we look a little similar too. And yes, this has led to some confusion from time to time. One student in a class we taught together even coined the name “Travii” for us.
As we publish more articles, we’ll add the links at the bottom of this one. So, bookmark it and check in on it when you want for updates.
We also want to hear from you. Feel free to comment below and let us know what else we should try to explain about ArcGIS Enterprise.
Travis and I look forward to these discussions and sharing the results of them with you.
Links to more in the series…
What is ArcGIS Enterprise?
Data on your infrastructure
All about GIS web services
The portal is a content management system… not ArcGIS Enterprise
Apps! What are they good for? Absolutely everything!
What is a web layer in ArcGIS Enterprise?
Thank you, Stephanie Oliver and Monica Stephens for your feedback and assistance through this process!
