Most stable ArcGIS Pro versions - Rule of thumb

[vnixon]

Hi everyone,

I am excited to find this group. I am hoping to get your advice on an ArcGIS Pro upgrade strategy for my organization of about 100 ArcGIS Pro users. I upgrade our organization a couple times every year. We unfortunately experienced a lot of issues after we upgraded to 3.0.3 recently so I would like to aim for the most stable versions going forward. Does anyone have a rule of thumb or a process for picking which upgrades to apply when you can only upgrade a couple of times each year?

Thanks for your advice,

Veronica 

[Jim_Wei · Accepted solution]

Are you familiar with this documentation page? Hope it helps you make your decision in your organization:

Releases and patches
https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/get-started/releases-and-patches.htm

[vnixon]

Hi Jim,

This documentation is really helpful. It sounds like there are different degrees of software recertification depending on whether it's a major upgrade, minor upgrade, or a patch. Because 3.0.3 was a patch, it wouldn't have gone through the extensive recertification process that 3.0 and 3.1 did so I'll probably aim for the minor upgrades like 3.1 going forward.

Thanks so much for the quick reply!

[jcarlson]

We'll often wait for the first patch before updating all of our workstations, or else we'll update one of them to test workflows in the newest version. We keep an eye on the Esri Community as well, to see if others are reporting issues after a new version is released.

Stability of the desktop software can depend on other factors, too. We had been holding off updating to 3.0 for a while because our Parcel Fabric performed terribly in the latest version of Pro. But when we republished the service itself from a 3.0 instance, those issues disappeared. So our stability issues related to the publishing runtime of the service being used.

[vnixon]

Hi Josh,

Thanks so much for this insight. That might be a good strategy to wait for the first patch and I have started inviting some of our power users to test out upgrades before I deploy. They are usually excited to get to upgrade earlier so they don't mind as much if they run into issues. 😉

Veronica  

[ErikLash4]

We've been working with tech support regarding the Parcel Fabric performance issues - a couple official bugs. Fix for at least one of the bugs was originally supposed to be implemented in 3.2 but was rolled into 3.1.1. 3.2 (Q4 2023) is still supposed to be the one that achieves stability according to what info comes my way.

A lot of this is, imho, on the prolonged ArcMap retirement. So much has changed in the OS since last development upgrade of ArcMap that the job of maintaining backwards compatibility in structure and tooling development across the Pro and ArcMap platform must be super challenging.

Maybe I'm being generous in postulating but methinks that once the ArcMap API (32 bit) support is removed from everything we'll see a lot fewer performance issues. I personally can't wait till ESRI embarks on multi-processor and GPU enabling its tooling for its basic user tools like Manifold has done. Being able to leverage CUDA Cores and multiple NUMA nodes in geoprocessing is a game changer.