I have Pro version 3.2 now and I have been very eager to try out the new Offline map feature available for parcel fabrics. I'm really hoping this can be a great solution for organizations managing heavy fabrics and are experiencing performance issues, where they can cut out a subset of their fabric to a portable geodatabase on a local drive for maximized performance in editing.
After trying it out today, I would have to say there is some disappointment
1. The Creating Offline Features sequence of the download takes a lot longer than I anticipated, mainly longer than 3 minutes while working locally on a small parcel fabric at a scale of 1:3000. The latency would cause one to question whether or not the download process to overcome latency while working directly off a branch version would even make make it worthwhile to utilize an offline map.
2. I was thrown off by the fact that, while the download process successfully took my default version and switched the sources across the board on my map to the mobile databases, the Records and Parcel Fabric Topology remained in the SDE database. Is this to be expected, that the topology cannot come with the rest of the data to govern and assist my fabric edits? I would consider this mobile, local database to be useless if I cannot process edits with ESRI's fabric tools that rely on active topology, such as the alignment tool.
3. The test edits I made to the offline map did not apply themselves to the SDE map when I applied the synch and or remove tools that apparently are supposed to update the SDE database based on changes to the offline database.
I'm sure there's great usage to the offline maps feature after all and I'm hoping an ESRI staff member can shed some light on the matter. Perhaps there is a bug preventing me from applying this tool properly.
