GISi was fortunate to send 10 our of employees to the Esri Interntaionl Developer Summit in Palm Springs, CA this week and they produced a recap each day of the sessions and plenary they attended. Each recap is broken down from Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 with highlights and then a more in depth write up from each developer. In total GISi produced over 17,000 words recapping three days from the conference!
The content is well written and very in depth with a wide range of topics. I have read over a few of the daily recaps and put together some highlights below.
The Anatomy of a Design Decision
The second day at the Esri Developer Summit kicked off very strong with an excellent, thought-provoking, and humorous presentation on “The Anatomy of a Design Decision” by keynote speaker Jared Spool. The question of how design decisions are made is an important one and was the focus of the presentation. There are no non-decisions we learned, just a spectrum of five design decision styles. Jared introduced us to new terminology specially crafted to explain these five styles of design decisions and when each “works great”.
Read more from Ryan on the keynote from Jared Spool
ArcGIS Online is Like Flickr
You can think of ArcGIS Online as the Flickr of Geospatial content. It provides an ever improving mechanism for viewing, editing and analyzing data. Just like Flickr I can define using groups, user credentials, and even active directory authentication to determine who can access my data. This assuaged a lot of my initial concerns dealing with security and access to sensitive information like property records.
Read More from Christopher on ArcGIS Online
Caching Capabilities in AGOL 10.1
Caching capabilities are enhanced at 10.1, notably in that the process of creating the cache has been decoupled from the map service itself. It can be done in the background without locking up the map service…just great for up-time! Also some great techniques were demonstrated for using non-production server resources to update cache consumed by production services.
Read more from Caleb on caching with AGOL 10.1
Learning About Esri UI Process
I learned a surprising amount from the presentation that discussed Esri’s UI design process. When they showed the video of how a user interacted with a prototype of a Esri product…I was impressed by the sheer amount of information gleaned from that process! Using a process of interview and interrogation, Esri was able to make very simple and significant changes to their “Community Maps” application. The recorded videos captured where volunteers clicked and thought information should be provided. The final result was surprisingly powerful compared to the very similar previous versions.
Read more about what Chris learned about Esri UI process
