Fed UC: Product News

While much of the formal presentation on stage focused around ArcGIS 9.2, specifically ArcGIS Server, Jack Dangermond shared a few new product tidbits:

- SDE for PostGres is expected in Summer (James Fee discussed the topic around the time of ESRI User Conference.)
- In addition to support for KML, ArcGIS Server will in the future offer support for Virtual Earth format. I asked Don Murray of Safe Software about that format and he said that it’s expected but is not available yet.

Update on ArcGIS for AutoCAD 1/10: I spoke the ESRI staffer who did the demo to be sure I got this right. He confirmed the “product” is still a ways off and that documents about it delivered to the show “disappeared” - I suspect ESRI decided to hold off on too many details as suggested by Don’s removal of data. More importantly, I learned that all that was happening in the demo was that a bitmap (raster) of the data was put into AutoCAD as a “backdrop” to the CAD entities; no AutoCAD entities were created, thus they couldn’t be edited. But, he noted, you could do an “identify” and get back attributes from the server. That’s based not on clicking on an entity, but passing the location of interest back to the server.

-original post follows-

There was also a reference to “ArcGIS for AutoCAD” which I understand to be an enhancement to make AutoCAD a full client to ArcGIS Server. By full client I mean can access data and services and the ability to edit data. One ESRI staffer suggested it’d be a free download that would enhance AutoCAD in this way. To me it sounds like a grown up, robust “CAD Client” which served a similar role in making CAD products clients to SDE, if in a more limited way. James notes that Don K. of ESRI pulled his post on his blog about this product.