Quick Look: ArcGIS Explorer

I sat down yeseterday for 30 minutes with Jack Dangermond to get a quick look at ArcGIS Explorer. Other information about the product has been published by Directions, our own APB and other blogs before so I won’t repeat what has been said other than to reiterate that the product is essentially "GIS on the Web". When geospatial visualization and analysis was first delivered by ESRI, Intergraph and others back around 1996-1998, no one really "wanted" GIS on the web. The internet was considered "too slow" to handle the advanced functionality considered necessary to be productive. That changes radically with ArcGIS Explorer as the available services it can call really does make the difference between desktop and web functionality transparent. ArcGIS Explorer, lets just call it AGE for the context of this report, does not really look like Googel Earth (GE) or Microsoft’s Virtual Earth (VE) so just put those arguments aside for now. If you are an experienced GIS user, you’ll love AGE. Yes, it have some of the "wiz-bang" of GE but because if it ability to call remote services like a WMS and other ArcGIS servers, the functionality to perform trace analysis along linear features, for example, go far beyond what you can do with any other visualization tool like GE or VE. Much like many desktop products such as ArcView or MapInfo or GeoMedia, you will find that although the workflow is different, the functionality of AGE closely approximates what you can find in those desktop products.

So, perhaps the obvious question is: "What do you buy?" AGE is free and for anyone with ArcIMS, you will probably want to move from that environment to AGE-ArcGIS Server. The architecture is different but the benefit may be worth the move. But the discussion gets very fuzzy if you have a situation where you’ve invested in desktop GIS systems but you know that more people could benefit from seeing/using geospatial information. Do you migrate to a completely web-based solution? We all tend to think that everyone is up on the latest technology and everyone moves to new environments and architectures when the vendor makes them available. Not so. Many are very comfortable sticking with ArcView and other desktop products. But if you have waited a long time thinking about how the internet would serve your enterprise better, then AGE may be worth a serious look. AGE is not yet available and Mr. Dangermond says more information is forthcoming in June and at the UC in August so we’ll keep watching.