ArcGIS Explorer 2500 discussion

[MarkBockenhauer]

Questions and comments in regards to ArcGIS Explorer 2012 beta and the ArcGIS Explorer 2500 release.

thanks,
ArcGIS Explorer Team

[EricPollard1]

Mark,
Thank you for keeping us up to date on this forum. I too am awaiting this release for dozens of users throughout our organization. We are actually flying people in from across the country for training at the end of this month. It would be IMMENSELY helpful to get an idea of an estimated date for the release (two days from now?, two weeks?), as I will need to create training/test/deploy/etc. I do appreciate the responses, as this is clearly an important product for many customers of ESRI.
Thanks,
Eric

[HarryBowman]

I received an email describing the need for a Bing Maps Key for various ESRI products. I did not notice a mention of ArcGIS Explorer.

I am posting question here because the Key issue will affect the soon-to-be released version.

Will ArcGIS Explorer be able to use Bing Maps through a key? Are there any details that can be shared about this?

World Imagery is not, as far as I can tell, as good as Bing Aerial yet.

Thanks.

[MichaelLakey]

Will ArcGIS Explorer be able to use Bing Maps through a key? Are there any details that can be shared about this?Thanks.

Earlier in this thread, Mark mentioned that the final release will be "Bing ready", assuming you have the key from Microsoft: http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/61091-ArcGIS-Explorer-2012-Beta-discussion?p=212205&viewfull=1#post...

Mike

[JosephSimon]

Add my voice to Eric's!
Just another week left for the month. I think the final was promised this month, so I hope we at least get an update by the end of the month.

Mark,
Thank you for keeping us up to date on this forum. I too am awaiting this release for dozens of users throughout our organization. We are actually flying people in from across the country for training at the end of this month. It would be IMMENSELY helpful to get an idea of an estimated date for the release (two days from now?, two weeks?), as I will need to create training/test/deploy/etc. I do appreciate the responses, as this is clearly an important product for many customers of ESRI.
Thanks,
Eric

[ThomasColson]

adding my voice to the masses as well. However, on the hypocritical flip-side, the more we push for an on-time release, the more liklihood of there being show-stopping bugs, which is usually the case with a major version release of ESRI products. It will be real disappointing to raise all this fuss just to find that it only runs on quad-core dual processor machines with 4GB video cards (the reason why we can't deploy 1750 is because of serious hardware incompatabilities).

[MarkBockenhauer]

The past few weeks we have been working on improving the performance of fully cached mapservices (Web Mercator Auxillary Sphere and WGS84, The ArcGIS online basemaps) in 3D.  This past weekend we discovered some new mathematical approaches that could yield even greater performance increases over what we currently have.  We are taking the next 2 days to assess whether this approach will yield the expected results.  This means that we will not be releasing ArcGIS Explorer 2500 this week.

TPColson - The ArcGIS Explorer 2500 system requirement level is the same as 1750.  We know that ArcGIS Explorer does have problems running on a combination of graphics cards and drivers, often an updated driver can resolve the issue, but it is not always the case.  As far as other system specs, if the graphics card and driver are not a problem, ArcGIS Explorer runs on some low end machines, at least by today's standards.  One of my test machines is a 10 year old XP OS single core pentium 4 with 2GB of ram, I even have a Windows 8 64 bit OS dual core with 2GB of ram.. and ArcGIS Explorer runs on both of them.

Mark

[HarryBowman]

Does 1750 work with the Bing Maps Key thing that is coming in February? If not, then the usefulness of AGX nearly 100% depends on the release of 2500 - Bing Maps Key ready.

We do not use 3D.

We use this software to put lines and points from file geodatabases and possibly shapefiles and geotagged photos on top of aerial imagery. That's what we do, all day long. World Imagery service does not cut it yet - it is not as good as Bing Aerial, especially outside the lower 48 states, and often within.

There are maybe two weeks left before the end of our use of AGX - crushing since I've been promoting it as a solution.

If there is a fairly stable Bing Maps Key ready build that can be installed, let us have it. 3D can wait.

[MatthewMurray1]

The past few weeks we have been working on improving the performance of fully cached mapservices (Web Mercator Auxillary Sphere and WGS84, The ArcGIS online basemaps) in 3D.  This past weekend we discovered some new mathematical approaches that could yield even greater performance increases over what we currently have.  We are taking the next 2 days to assess whether this approach will yield the expected results.  This means that we will not be releasing ArcGIS Explorer 2500 this week.

TPColson - The ArcGIS Explorer 2500 system requirement level is the same as 1750.  We know that ArcGIS Explorer does have problems running on a combination of graphics cards and drivers, often an updated driver can resolve the issue, but it is not always the case.  As far as other system specs, if the graphics card and driver are not a problem, ArcGIS Explorer runs on some low end machines, at least by today's standards.  One of my test machines is a 10 year old XP OS single core pentium 4 with 2GB of ram, I even have a Windows 8 64 bit OS dual core with 2GB of ram.. and ArcGIS Explorer runs on both of them.

Mark

Mark,


Once you have an answer on whether your new approach will work or not, will you be providing an update as to when 2500 will be released?

[ThomasColson]

Mark, this is incredibly frustrating. IT won't roll out 1750 knowing that a new release is due out, but you keep announcing delays of a new release. Meanwhile we have a non-ArcMap user base (large) that is increasingly dependent on access to basic GIS data. We're not in an ESRI testing lab, we have computers with very restrictive hardware and software bottlenecks due to corporate policies, T1 connections that are firewalled down to 128K, so all the "Bling" web services, ArcGIS online, and 3D "extras" really aren't in high demand. Explorer desktop is a great tool for us to deliver enterprise GIS products to lower-tier GIS consumers. I suspect that many posters in this thread share the same issues. Like a previous poster, all we want to do is push out feature classes and shapefiles so people can do their jobs. They're not going to sit in their (service/patrol) vehicle and wait 2 hours for 1m resolution air photo to load in 3D over a broadband connection. They're just not interested in that.  Is there a threshold at which all the extra speed and features, which are really used by a small portion of Explorer users, can be shelved to a new release and the rest of us can move forward with our (ESRI-Based) GIS architecture build-outs?

[NickRose2]

Hi,

The beta version was extremely buggy, and it is good that the development team have taken their time to ensure it is stable. However, now is not the time to experiment with new alogorithms for improving 3D performance. Developing new features/improvements now will just push the release further back, or even worse, force a release upon us that has not been propertly tested. It is far better to release with outstanding issues fixed, and wait for improvements in other functionality for a later release.

Regards,

Nick