ESRI Users Questions Answered

ESRI Users questions answered from ESRI International User Conference 2007



Mapperz Mixed Pick from http://gis2.esri.com/library/userconf/index.html


When will ESRI certify support on Microsoft’s Vista operating system?
We will complete our testing and add support for the Microsoft Vista operating systems in the third quarter 2007 for ArcGIS Desktop 9.2. We will support all products on Windows Vista at the ArcGIS 9.3.

NOTE: Due to some issues with Vista, several patches from Microsoft will be required in order to run ArcGIS under Vista.

What is the status of ESRI’s support for running ArcGIS on 64-bit operating systems?
ESRI is currently performing certification testing for ArcGIS Desktop 9.2 to support 64-bit processors. This will be delivered with service pack 3 in July.


What is ESRI doing in ArcGIS to make it easier for users to share geoprocessing models and best practices?
ESRI will publish a new Web site named the Geoprocessing Center to coincide with the ArcGIS 9.3 release in an effort to promote the sharing of geoprocessing models and scripts among the ArcGIS user community. This new resource center is part of the ESRI support site. By openly sharing these models and scripts, we can help each other learn and apply geoprocessing for solving many types of problems. ArcGIS 9.3 will make it easy to publish models to, as well as search for and download models from, the Geoprocessing Center.


When will ESRI support better handling of graphical exports of large format maps (72 x 55 inches and larger)?
The next major release after ArcGIS 9.3 will include a new plotting and graphic display system that will significantly increase display performance and support large format map export as a primary capability.


Can you improve the performance of the “Near” spatial analysis tool?
(Requested many times to ESRI UK - you try using 'near' with 28 million addresses)

Yes, ArcGIS 9.3 will include a new approach for performing proximity analysis that substantially increases the performance of the Near tool. New functionality will be provided that calculates the distances between and among various features (points, lines, and polygons). The output of this function will be a new "near table" that can be subsequently used for various kinds of spatial analysis (e.g., spatial statistics).



What is ESRI doing about the speed of ArcMap?
In the next major release after ArcGIS 9.3, ESRI will implement a new display pipeline into ArcGIS that will radically improve display performance and scalability.


Microsoft is developing a spatial type in SQL Server. Will ESRI be supporting this?
(codenamed 'Katmai' will be SQL Server 2008 with Spatial Database Support. This manages any type of data from relational data to documents, geographic information and XML.)

Yes, ESRI is working closely with Microsoft and will release support for this spatial type as a standard part of ArcGIS clients (direct connect) and ArcGIS Server (ArcSDE gateway). This capability will be supported with ArcGIS 9.3. We will coordinate the timing of the release of this functionality with Microsoft’s release schedule.

More info on Microsoft SQL Server 2008
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/futureversion/default.mspx