ArcGIS Pro RSS update notifications for IT

[Jen_Zumbado-Hannibal]

UPDATE: I found that this is not a new idea after all. There was a post back in 2016 that requested the same enhancement. Apparently, it once existed. However, they developed this support portal instead and they still missed the mark!

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It would be very wise for ESRI to think about the IT folks who are responsible for keeping software updates on client machines and servers. 

My IT team is really frustrated because they don't know when ArcGIS Pro updates are coming out. They ask me if there is an RSS feed. The only time they know a new version is out is when a user put's in a Help Desk ticket to have their desktop app updated. The user doesn't have admin rights so an IT staff has to go to each individual pc to update clients.   

ESRI...please work on a IT silent install workflow for all your updates. Blog sites are just not an effective use of communication for folks that are not GIS users or those who are for that matter. 

GIS relies on IT to have their systems running properly and everyone on the same version. Don't leave them out from your communications. DO BETTER AT COMMUNICATING UPDATES TRHOUGH AUTOMATIC FEEDS. 

Thanks. 

[bdewitt_olsson]

Another GIS admin in IT here, I would like to further emphasize the need for email notifications for updates and patches, preferably with a few days of lead time. Trying to keep 250 ArcGIS Pro users all on the latest version can only realistically be done with a centralized deployment, and a centralized deployment can only be done in a timely manner if notifications are received. IT administrators don't realistically have time in their day to scan websites for software updates.

[McKinneyPatrick_PA]

I have created a python script that scrapes the Esri support website for patch listings. 

You can modify the URL scraped to match the products and versions you are interested in. 

You can also check if the date of the patch is X days or X weeks old.  That is, if you run this script every week, you would enable the logic to check for any new patches released within the last week.

The script is available at https://github.com/pmacMaps/esri-arcpy-python/blob/main/check-esri-patches-website.py.

[JordanCarmona]

I wrote this a few months ago and it has been working very well for me:

Spatial-Grimoire/arcgis-patch-notifier-sample.py at main · FeralCatColonist/Spatial-Grimoire

A similar approach to @McKinneyPatrick_PA, this requests the .json feed of Esri patches and then compares it against a local copy for differences.