#ESRIUC: 9.3.1 Tips and Tricks
While most users have ArcGIS 9.3.1 in hand and many have installed it, there are still some goodies in there that might not be widely used. So, part of the plenary was a “new features” session.
One of the more impressive demos highlighted tuning ArcGIS Server for better performance. The cool part: ESRI added a tool to ArcGIS to help find the source of the slowdowns. They might include some bad paths to data, layers that must be projected on the fly, unindexed layers and the like. The tool identifies potential “bumps” in the road and the user can then fix them. Some can be fixed right from the tool’s list. The other part of the performance increase relies on some new code in the graphics engine in ArcGIS Server.
The tool is one many vendors should be considering: how to take the best practices known by some and turn them into basically a wizard for others. That way, ideally, all server implementations are faster and ESRI and its customers look good.
A “best practices” discussion illustrated the value of separating base and operational layers in an application. The former don’t change while the latter are used for analysis. Separating them this way makes it easy to “swap in” a new or different base map.
There was also a demo of all the ArcGIS Online’s “easy fast and free” datasets. I think ESRI is working hard to get users to depend on and use these new datasets both in ArcGIS and ArcGIS Explorer. That will be a first step, I think, in getting users to share their data via ArcGIS Online, which Dangermond noted users had been clamoring for for quite a while. The reaction didn’t seem to match that statement or perhaps since users had seen this feature (it was launched in beta a few weeks ago, our coverage) it was old news.
