Day 1 And 2 At The ESRI Business Partner Conference

http://mandown.co.nz/events/day-1-and-2-at-the-esri-business-partner-conference/

Day 1 And 2 At The ESRI Business Partner Conference
Events - Tuesday, March 18 2008

The ESRI Worldwide Business Partner Conference kicked off yesterday in sunny but slightly cold Palm Springs. The plenary session was pretty full with Business Partner's attending from all over the world. The stage area was different to what I have normally seen in the past, with two massive screens and nice colours decorating the stage area.

A lot was mentioned and showed off at the plenary session with some cool demos (those that worked) showcasing some of the new technology that is coming from ESRI. I was pretty interested with some of the results that Chris Capelli talked and showed us.
The growth of the products are as follows:Desktop +15%Server + 31%Developer + 52%You can see that things are going well and I am impressed with the developer growth. This is great to see more and more developers out there adopting the ESRI technology. I think with ArcGIS 9.3 coming out soon this will increase even more. The ESRI family is doing well and are growing.
Some of the main areas that were talked about were mobile and enterprise. I lost count how many times the word enterprise was mentioned. The view that we were given of what users out there are looking for:

Managing enterprise information systemsManaging asset informationBetter planning and analysisGetting information into the fieldProviding a view of operationsChris talked about location aware applications and how this is becoming popular. He talked about the road to the future and how mobile is area to concentrate on. ESRI is placing greater emphasis on mobile technologies like ArcPad and ArcMobile and this is visible in the latest releases.

I attended a few other sessions which were mainly high level but there was still a few things that I picked up that I thought might be useful. Some notes are below:

ArcGIS Image Server is now an extension for ArcGIS Server. You require an extension licence to use this. This is a pretty neat feature and I think it's good that ESRI are slowly integrating the two products.

Some improvments on ArcGIS Server include:
30% or more performance increase with ArcGIS Server 9.3REST and JavaScript API'sImproved cache management toolsOGC (WFS, WMS, WCS)Role based securityPrint tasks and map tipsAnimation libraries and more wizardsStreamlined

Some improvments on the ArcMobile side of things include:

Task driven UIWindows smart client supportLocal cachingEditing tools which are now out of the boxArcMobile management console which is now part of the ArcGIS Server management consoleMobile SDKArcMobile now includes StreetMap mobile

So lots of cool new stuff is coming from ESRI. If you want a full list of what's coming in ArcGIS 9.3, have a look here: http://www.esri.com/software/.

I attended a bundle of other sessions as well throughout the day. One of the best sessions that I attended was a session on Presentations and Demonstrations. It was by far one of the best presentations I have seen in a long while. I ended up taking almost 5 pages of notes! It taught me a bundle of tips and tricks, goods and bads about giving presentations. With with current job I am actively giving more presentations and demonstrations to clients and this is excellent.
Apart from the sessions it has been great catching up with people and meeting some of the business partners. The BP conference is starting to wind down and you can see more and more of the developers arriving for the ESRI Developer Summit which starts tomorrow. I hope to be posting alot more about the sessions so stay tuned :)

Update: I forgot about this, Jack at the plenary session mentioned that ArcGIS 9.3 will be with customers by June this year. Something to look forward to. June is not far off!