New Story Maps - Anyone Happy or Impressed?

[Anonymous User]

Why can I not add a YouTube link to the main window? A 20MB video file limit is ridiculous for what is supposed to be "A Quantum Leap for Story Maps"

Also, will story maps ever have multi-user editing capabilities? They're an amazing tool for individuals, but horrible for working as a group when only one person can edit at a time.

It all just looks a typical cascade story map with less options. Restricted design and restricted outlet for creativity.

[OwenGeo]

Hi Glen -- Thanks for providing us with your feedback on the new ArcGIS StoryMaps. As someone who sounds like one of our power authors, we understand that you may not yet be satisfied with the feature set of the new builder compared to the classic templates, which were developed over the course of seven years.

We hope you understand that this is the very first release of this new product, and its capabilities will be expanding rapidly. We're working hard to bring more features to the builder—including the ones you've mentioned—and will be releasing updates often. In fact, we've got several more updates planned just for the rest of this year, so please check back in the future to see what's new.

Please note that the limit for video uploads is 50 MB (images are currently limited to 20 MB). This feature provides authors with the convenience of being able to upload shorter looping videos directly in the builder without having to use a 3rd party site. For longer narrated videos, we already support adding content from YouTube, Vimeo, and now over 250 other video hosting sites (Facebook, Daily Motion, Wistia, Reuters, and many more) in the main, scrolling part of the story, and we will be expanding that support so that videos from those sites can be used in other parts of the story as well.

[Anneka_France]

I'm fully on board with the concept of the new StoryMaps and think that a unified builder has been much needed. The new builder is much more intuitive and looks much more modern than the classic templates. I also love some of the new features like adding cards, buttons and express maps. We previously 'mixed and matched' the classic templates by embedding StoryMaps within StoryMaps, but this sometimes caused scaling issues and wasn't mobile friendly. We hope that the new builder will eventually allow us to add all the features we need into a single, mobile ready StoryMap.

However, it concerns me that the new builder still doesn't have anywhere near the same functionality as the old builders and there is a very short transition period between the Classic Esri Story Maps and the new StoryMaps. If I understand correctly, it's less than a year until the classic builders are removed and less than 3 years until existing apps can no longer be edited. Some of our projects have a planned duration of 3 to 5 years (hopefully longer) and budgeting has only accounted for the development of one iteration of StoryMaps. We are now having to choose between delivering work that doesn't meet the original specification (because we don't have the functionality in the new builder) or creating StoryMaps that will not last the duration of the funded project.

We'd really like to see a much more detailed breakdown of the road map and expected timelines for updates, or have an extended timeline for the transition period.

[OwenGeo]

Anneka -- Thanks for your feedback about the transition timeline. Our goal is to add most of the major capabilities and features of the classic templates to the new ArcGIS StoryMaps over the next several months (and, of course, there are already and will be lots of new features as well!).

We will review the timeline as we approach each milestone date and will consider adjusting if we see a need for that.

Here's an article that has some more information on the transition and timeline: Moving to the new ArcGIS StoryMaps

[SteveCole]

Do you ever anticipate developing an "importer" that would allow users to migrate Classic Story Maps to the newer standard?

[OwenGeo]

Hi Steve -- We are not currently planning to build an import or migration tool from classic stories. Our team did discuss it, but there were many reasons we didn't see sufficient value in devoting the significant resources required to build and maintain a tool for that.

For authors who do wish to redo a story in the new builder, it's fairly easy to bring in content from a classic story. You can bring in any web maps/scenes, re-add photos and other media links, and paste in text. The process of redoing a story in the new builder also provides the opportunity to revise/update it to take advantage of new capabilities like express maps, sidecars, video upload, and many more features that are coming in the future.