Bring back the capability of using basemap services within a map service. We built an application using ArcGIS 10.0 using this functionality and are in the process of developing the next version of our application; however, this issue is becoming a roadblock for us.
Hosting the raster/tiled layers is not a viable option for us due to cost, maintenance and security reasons. Our business need is to be able to create (on demand in a secure custom application) map images that composite local vector data with remotely hosted/served raster/tiled data. For example, a boundary polygon on top of satellite imagery or soils data. There are several remote datasets that we do this with from various vendors/partners. And due to heightened security, we are unable to use ArcGIS Online and other services once the map service has been published by our map server.
Our business need is implemented in our application using standard functionality in 10.0 (and previous incarnations of ESRI map services). We use ArcGIS map services that include both our local data and the remote data sets. To generate the images we use ESRIs flex and javascript APIs which use the image export functionality of ArcGIS services.
The critical issue is the need to create map images with data that we only have access to via other services (ArcGIS sevices, wms services, etc.), because as mentioned it is not feasible for us to host all these data ourselves.
