Test ArcGIS Online Updates before rolling them out

[RichardHowe]

Literally every time ESRI pushes out an ArcGIS Online update does it cost us a day of work while they fix whatever issues the latest update has introduced. It's beyond a joke now and is incredibly hard to defend to colleagues and clients. The stress testing of these updates needs to be properly done before pushing it out instead of beta testing them on paying customers

[TrentonWalker]

We can't do our jobs today. We'll be seriously reconsidering whether Esri provides the service reliability we need when building mission-critical applications. I fully understand that the people who work at Esri are human just like the rest of us, but the system they've built has to be more than that, and the updates they publish need to be human-proof. This cannot happen when some of Esri's services are relied on for life-or-death decision-making.

[ClayDonaldsonSWCA]

The early adopter community exists, but they didn't have any release notes or details on what changed. So there wasnt even really a proper beta this go-around.😤

[ZachBodenner]

Honest question to those who are expressing considering moving off of ESRI - what alternatives are you looking at? I totally get that a planned and scheduled update causing these issues is very poor (and this one in particular seems a doozey), but ESRI does usually get these fixed relatively quickly, and I'm unaware of any other software companies that never have any upgrade errors and problems. 

[HollyTorpey_LSA]

Update: I just was finally able to sign into Pro. Maybe things are getting resolved.

On another note, I can't believe I haven't gotten an email from Esri this morning. ArcGIS Online Administrators should have been notified as soon as they realized there was a major issue. I shouldn't have to come on here to find out why nothing is working.

[AnthonyJonesRSK]

@ZachBodenner I agree, I think the software is generally fairly stable and has massively improved our service offering. I think we've just had a few issues after updates in recent times (particularly in the UK where our preferred projection British National Grid has been missed out of updates on 3 separate occasions!) and I think that colours people's perceptions. I was quite looking forward to checking out all the new functionality this morning and have spent the day dealing with issues instead. It would just be great if there was a way to revert the old version or test the new version for longer to resolve some of the issues before launch.

[SaraJL]

I always expect a certain amount of hiccups when software updates are deployed, so that doesn't really bother me that much - as long as it's resolved asap. When it doesn't get resolved or I have very little communication on the status of something, that's usually when I get frustrated.

From my experience, I can 100% say I would rather use ESRI products any day. It's a lot more robust than other software, a lot easier to train on, doesn't require coding (because it's shouldn't require a background in programming to do GIS), and the documentation available is better than other platforms. So I wouldn't want to switch to something else because it would give me a whole other host of problems. In addition to the fact that my users would not be getting an accurate reflection of what the industry is (if they don't know how to use ArcGIS)

Long story short - issues are going to happen, and that doesn't automatically mean the software is bad. Technology is always going to have problems because that's the nature of the business. It only matters how we communicate it and how we work around it.

#digitaliteracy4life

[OllyD]

We're on day two now and much of our org's online content will still not load in either ArcPro or AGOL. This is genuinely baffling and the lack of clear messaging from ESRI makes it difficult to explain to the rest of my org why this is happening and when it'll be fixed. 

[David_Brooks]

@OllyD seconded. Feature services are all inaccessible or showing as corrupt.

[David_Brooks]

"No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource."

[RTPL_AU]

@SaraJL  Fully agree. They are a monopoly for a reason - nothing else comes close at an overall platform level.
This has unfortunately led to us being treated in a way that would not happen if there was decent competition in the market. I, for one, am sick of being gaslit all the time that it is my hardware, my software, my data, my network, my whatever, every time I report an issue to a mandatory local reseller or in this Community. 

Complicated software has issues -100%.
Good companies mitigate this in various ways - dropping feature + fix heavy versions every six months is not one I feel is the best.

I'm typing this on a Saturday morning while waiting for an Offline Area to package in FieldMaps for people going bush Monday. I don't know if the failures are me or AGOL and there is nothing in the Community except Esri staff telling people to report issues to the local resellers, that don't work on weekends if you're not a big government client...