Thank you for coming to ArcGIS Ideas to help shape the future of the Esri products you use. Whether you’re giving kudos to other community members’ ideas, adding your use case in the comments, or submitting original ideas, we value your contributions!
Your feedback is important to us and we take it seriously. Product team members are subscribed to idea exchanges and labels so that they can keep a finger on the pulse of what you are requesting and build software and services that best meet your needs. In order to make idea exchanges productive, we ask that you keep the following in mind both before and during the submission process.
The Basics
1. Before submitting a new idea, we recommend searching the community for a solution or to see if your idea already exists. If you do find an idea which is related to what you intended to post, save yourself time and vote for the existing idea by giving it a kudo. Optionally, provide more context and information about your use case in the idea’s comments.
2. Once you’re confident you have a valid idea, find the right Idea Exchange.
3. Submit your idea using the guidelines below for the community to vote on!
Esri reserves the right to review, modify, delete, reprint or redistribute all content that users contribute to Idea Exchanges. For more information, please refer to the Community terms of use.
Pre-submission Considerations
1. No questions please. Idea Exchanges are designed to receive requests for new or improved features and functionality. They are not meant to ask questions or request help. If you have a question, post it in the appropriate question board to see if other community members are able to help. If you need immediate assistance with an issue, or are seeking direct communication with an Esri representative, please Contact Us and select the relevant channel (Customer Service, Technical Support, etc.)
2. No bugs please. Idea Exchanges are not the right place to log software bugs or crashes. Keep in mind that just because it isn’t the right fit as an Idea does not mean that we aren’t here to help. Bugs and crashes should be logged with Technical Support. If working in ArcGIS Desktop/ArcGIS Pro, crashes can be reported by sending an error report.
Note: To contact Technical Support, you need to be an authorized caller. See Why can't I submit cases? (Or, How I became an authorized caller and reported my issue) for more information.
3. Pricing and licensing requests are not a good fit for Idea Exchanges. Please work with an account manager or sales team with feedback about pricing or what is included at certain license levels. Ideas related to these will be archived.
4. Performance issues are typically complex and involve troubleshooting that may be specific to data, hardware, network, bandwidth, and so on, that are not generally applicable to all users. While ideas related to performance are not strictly off limits, it will usually be more productive to work with Technical Support to troubleshoot performance concerns.
Submission Considerations
After considering the points above, when you’re ready to submit a new idea, consider the following:
1. One submission = One idea. If you find yourself making a bulleted list, you may have more than one idea. Having more than one idea is awesome! Because the number of kudos is part of what drives ArcGIS Ideas, it is important for product teams to understand what users are voting for. Help us make more informed decisions by only submitting a single idea per post. Submissions that list out multiple requests will be marked as Needs Clarification with kudos disabled until corrected.
2. Title. Use descriptive keywords that include the area of the product you’re working in and the functionality requested. Ask yourself, “If I were searching for this to vote on it, could I find it?”
3. Labels. Not all Idea Exchanges use pre-defined labels, but if you’re submitting an idea in one that does, you will need to choose a label. Use the link in the label section to view label descriptions to help you choose. Product development teams subscribe to labels, so taking a minute to label your idea correctly will help get it in front of the right team. Don’t stress too much if you’re not sure. Do your best and we’ll change it if we need to!
4. Description. This is where you can bring the idea to life. In addition to detailing what you’d like to see, describing your workflow and positioning the request in that context helps product teams understand why developing this idea would be a beneficial investment of limited development resources. Specific and descriptive wording is great. Including screenshots is encouraged. Gifs or videos are the best! Your goal here is to provide the reader with an unambiguous understanding of what is being requested.
5. Tags. While Labels in Idea Exchanges are pre-defined, tags are freeform text that you can use to provide an added layer of searchability and specificity to your idea. Let’s say that you have an idea about definition queries in ArcGIS Pro. You read the label descriptions and learn that this is a Map Authoring idea. A logical tag would be ‘definition query’.
6. Write in English. While Esri staff work around the world and speak many languages, our software development teams communicate and manage issues in English. Because Idea Exchanges are a part of Esri Community and the system is designed to facilitate community voting on user ideas, submitting ideas in English will ensure that you’re reaching the widest possible audience. Non-English ideas will not be removed but may not gain much traction.
ArcGIS Idea Statuses
There are seven statuses that can be applied to ideas across all Idea Exchanges in Esri Community. Below is an overview of these statuses, which are used to communicate with users about where the idea stands.
| Open |
All ideas start here! We use the submission guidelines above to make sure these are ready for voting and commenting from the community. Votes and additional feedback through comments help product teams to move the idea along. |
| Needs Clarification |
Thank you for your idea! However, we need a little help with understanding the request before it can be open to voting. We'll communicate to explain what action is needed in order to change the idea's status.
If you see this status on an idea that you didn't submit, feel free to chime in with your own examples in the comments.
For some guidance on how to craft an effective idea, refer to the submission guidelines above.
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| Already Offered |
You're in luck! It is already possible to do what is being requested. Ideas with this status should have a corresponding comment demonstrating the functionality or pointing to resources and they cannot receive additional votes. |
| Under Consideration |
You've got our attention! We think this is a good suggestion and have entered it in our backlog. This does not guarantee that the idea will be developed so we encourage the community to continue voting and sharing feedback which will help teams gauge user demand. |
| In Product Plan |
We're working on this! This status does not guarantee that the functionality will be in the next release, but development work has begun. Release cycles vary by product so make sure to check the product life cycle information to get an idea of when to expect the next release. |
| Implemented |
Congratulations! The idea made its way into the software. Implemented ideas cannot receive further votes. |
| Closed |
Unfortunately, not all ideas are a good fit. These are not being considered at this time and will not be open to further voting.
Ideas may be closed for different reasons, and we will do our best to communicate and let the community know why this idea isn’t a good match for our current plans. Thank you for your contribution!
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Thank you again for taking the time to share thoughtful, high-quality ideas. We truly appreciate your contributions to continuously improving our products and services to help you do your work. Go to ArcGIS Ideas to learn more about how it works, find the right idea exchange, and start participating!
