ArcGIS Online June Updates - Items of Note for Education
The latest update of ArcGIS Online just went live last week and there are many blogs related to the update. If you want to read about all of the details, I highly recommend the ‘What’s New’ blog by Bernie.
The help documentation also includes a full list of the new functionality that can be found here: What’s New - ArcGIS Online Help
The goal of this short blog is to dive into a couple of the updates that I found to be the most relevant for the education community.
The topics I am going to review include:
- Administration – delete users, review storage, and accessibility improvements
- Data Pipelines – new data ‘magic wand’ tool for ArcGIS Online
- Raster Analysis – raster functions in MapViewer
Administration
The latest release includes a couple of enhancements that should help out administrators, specifically related to deleting users, reviewing storage, and accessibility.
Related to user deletion, there are now tools built into the member administration panel that allow for transferring content and managing group membership, which were two of the sticking points that would prevent user deletion. Also, if a user has licenses, they will simply be removed when they are deleted (the licenses will be freed up).
Each ArcGIS Online organization comes with a Standard Feature Data Store by default. This storage is capped at 500GB and some very active organizations are starting to fill up that space. Under the Overview page, the % of storage used is now displayed, and you have the ability to click on ‘Feature Data Store’ to generate an item report.
Lastly, a number of accessibility enhancements were added to Instant Apps and ArcGIS Dashboards to better support screen readers and keyboard shortcuts.
Data Pipelines
As I have mentioned many times – a modern GIS is about data as services. While this might be true, the ability to work directly with services and create real-time/synced data feeds still requires an ability to work with APIs and scripts. The alternative is to download snapshots of data from an open data website and then republish it.
For making this workflow so much more accessible, this is the update that I am the most excited about.
Basically, Data Pipelines is a magic wand that helps you pull 3rd party data into ArcGIS Online. The full details can be found on the blog here: Introducing Data Pipelines
The short video that I included here, shows how I used an API from the NYC Open Data website, to generate a feature layer of 311 calls. After generating the feature, I could then create a separate Data Pipeline to provide updates to the service. Users can also share their Data Pipeline items with other users, modify them, etc.
Raster analysis in the map viewer
Lastly, this latest update of ArcGIS Online brings raster functions to the map viewer, in addition to the existing 24 analysis tools. There are 155 raster functions to choose from, and even more when using the raster function templates. Additionally, there is a new workflow available to work with the raster function editor to create raster function templates as an item in ArcGIS Online.
A new dimension slider tool has also been included for those working with multidimensional data, allowing for improved visualization and animation capabilities.
To learn more about these updates, visit the blog post What’s New in ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online.
Close
As always - if you have any questions or thoughts on the updates, please let us know! I for one would love to see some new 'Data Pipeline' items start appearing in ArcGIS Online.