ArcGIS Online Updates --- A Customer Viewpoint

[mpboyle]

This is going to be rant about ArcGIS Online updates, and hopefully it reaches other Esri customers that feel the same way, and is heard by Esri staff...

Let me start by saying that I REALLY do enjoy GIS and most Esri products. It gives us, the GIS community, a chance to be creative, help our colleagues analyze and visualize datasets, and for those of us in the public sector (which I am) the ability to provide data to all sorts of public users.

ArcGIS Online has become a centerpiece of Esri product integration, whether it be Pro, Experience Builder, dashboards, surveys, Field Maps, etc... and I got to say to Esri: you HAVE to do better with your ArcGIS Online updates.

So many customers are finding broken experiences, dashboards that now look wonky with font sizes, selectors that no longer work, Field Map items no longer seeming to function as expected prior to the update, and I'm sure other hidden items that I'm not aware of.

Speaking for myself, and some of my colleagues, it often feels that these updates are haphazardly released, not properly vetted, and done so to meet some sort of requirement for a quarterly update.

As an example, I can't count the dozens of dashboards I now have to review to see if simple things like font sizes are way off, whether they be too big or too small, check for color palettes that have been reset, or explain to users that aren't as technically savvy how to clear their browser cache in order to get a pop-up to work in Experience Builder.

We have a great team of GIS professionals in our group, and are often commended for the work we do, and I can't help but think of smaller organizations that may only be a single person shop that is trying to get GIS buy-in from management. Those users, having a day like today where many of the products you've built no longer look or function as expected, and trying to explain that.

Please....when an update is to be released, provide a notice PRIOR to the update with a list of changes to give users an expectation of what WILL be changed so we have some sort of an idea of what to expect. Put this in a splash screen on AGO, provide a soft release or toggle for items where we can preview changes. Showing up to work after the past few ArcGIS Online updates, I'm now expecting things to be broken, apps not to work, dashboards not to look as they did the previous day, and spend my day talking to Esri Support about what is an intended change versus what is a bug.

Maybe I'm the only one that feels this way, but I have a feeling I'm not.

[WillyG]

I fully agree with this and share your frustrations.  The communication could be vastly improved. Nor us, or our clients know when the updates are happening. We are supposed to get emails, but we don't.  This is exacerbated by the fact that we are in New Zealand, and updates are rolled out in the afternoon, which often means we can't work while these updates are being rolled out. We experienced an outage on Thursday afternoon that we attributed to the update, and everything went down, so we were scrambling to tell all our clients that an update was rolled out. We didn't know this wasn't actually the update, and the real update would arrive Friday afternoon, so we got more unexpected disruption and then a lot of our dashboards ended up <br>oken.

Many of these issues that we are experiencing could have been solved during the early adopter program, but early adopter seems tricky to opt into and also hard to find the time, especially at the end of the financial year when things are incredibly busy, so we need a much more efficient way to engage with this.

It's great that we get the New features in ArcGIS Online popup once the update is complete, but we need the inverse. We need a message popping up informing all users that an update is going to be rolled out with a countdown out an to expect disruption and a list of what to expect from the upcoming rollout.  This should be in the same place as the 'New features in ArcGIS online message', but I think a great place would be within experience builder as most of our clients have an experience builder interface to integrate all their apps, and they don't often venture outside of experience builder.

 Right now, I'm typing this up on a Saturday morning and have just been inspecting what is broken in dashboards following the update, so I can get a head start to field clients' questions on Monday. It shouldn't be this way. 

[GrantHoward1]

are you me?

Very similar situation for me. Public sector, with a robust GIS team, and tremendous GIS buy-in from the rest of the department, but these udpates are not just embarassing for ESRI, they are embarrasing to use GISers too. (tbh, it actually doesn't seem like ESRI is embarassed).
I feel bad saying to staff "it's not me, it's the software". Makes me sound unaccountable and lazy. I don't like it.
I love and support your idea of ESRI giving a heads up for the updates. That would be a start.
But there would still be massive headaches if they don't get these updates figured out. It feels like we are the sandbox environment. I want to believe they test these updates before rolling them out. And I get that some will cause issues they didn't catch, but these updates shouldn't be breaking as many elements as they do. Like you said, maybe they are just "updating just to update". It makes sense when an update improves a tool/functionality, but when an update actually breaks a perfectly functioning tool or feature it's puzzling and frustrating.

[JonathanMcD]

02:00 (BST) and I'm trying to publish a newly created Gallery App that is needed to replace the perfectly good Gallery App that I had on Wednesday. I dread to think what I have to do to check and ensure all the 40 odd plus Instant Apps within that gallery. And, of course, will this new app publish ... of course not ... I'm just sitting here watching the Wheel of Doom. 

I'm in the fortunate position of being a GIS team of one for 4,500 organisational employees - I dread to think what my mailbox will look like on Monday. Equally, we have a fairly decent (even if I say so myself) open data presence - will have to go through all of its support apps too.

[NicoleJohnson]

This thread is a few days old now, but I wanted to add my two cents.

Software just isn't going to work 100% of the time, but it's come to the point where I dread these updates, June especially. I never know what random things I'm going to find broken.

I don't appreciate us users being forced into crowdsourcing bugs. I'd rather join an early adopter program for Experience Builder, but there isn't one.

I also don't appreciate having to make excuses on Esri's behalf. It doesn't make me feel any better that these issues aren't my fault, because I know they only harm the perception of these products at my org, where they don't have great traction yet. It's a lose-lose situation for me and Esri.

I don't want to blame any one person or team, as this really seems like an organization-wide issue. Please, Esri, improve your testing practices. Create early adopter programs for more of your products, or find some way to let users give you real-world examples of how your products are being used so updates can be tested against those.