What's Happening With The ESRI Developer Network?

I starten af denne måned dukkede der et et nyt ESRI web site op: The ESRI Ressource Center. Dette har givet anledning til en smule undren blandt brugere af ESRI EDN sitet ... Og ja, man kan kun undres.

I the beginning of this month ESRI released a new web site: The ESRI Ressource Center. Questions about why and for what use has been raised among users of the ESRI EDN site ... And well, you can only wonder why.

/Sik

http://mandown.co.nz/esri/what-s-happening-with-the-esri-developer-network/

What's Happening With The ESRI Developer Network?

ESRI - Friday, July 18 2008

With the release of ArcGIS 9.3 there have been a number of changes to ESRI web sites along with new web sites like the ArcGIS 9.3 Resource Centre.

I posted earlier in the week that the ESRI Developer Network had been updated. Since then many people have been asking what is happening with the ESRI Developer Network and why the changes?

The EDN Website Blog has provided some information on the changes.

Starting with ArcGIS version 9.3 in July 2008, developers are encouraged to use the new ESRI Resource Centers to access SDK documentation, samples, product technical information, as well as tools and resources for interacting with communities of ArcGIS developers around the world.
For the time being, this EDN website here will continue to exist and be the repository for developer content for ArcGIS versions 9.2 and prior. It will no longer be used for ArcGIS version 9.3 nor beyond.

Why?

Our goal here is to create one single website for all users' product usage resource needs. At version 9.2 and prior, developers used the EDN website and end-users of ESRI's GIS software tended to use the ESRI Support Center online.

Feedback from the user community, as well as our own technology development goals indicate that developers need information about product installation, architecture, administration, and functional usage as much as any other user, and end-users more and more often are making use of information for product customization, components, scripting, programming, and other resources typically associated with application developers. As our technology continues to grow along with the maturity of information technology, the lines between "user" and "developer" continue to blur and overlap.

So as you use the ESRI Resource Center online, we encourage you to interact with other developers like yourself, as well as GIS end-users and the resources they all use to be successful. That is the place online where the EDN community will continue to grow, through code sharing galleries, discussion forums, and blogs from ESRI development teams, as well as new community tools and resources upcoming such as open chat, tech workshop webcasts, and a fully wiki'd Knowledge Base technical documentation set.

What about the EDN program?

The ESRI Developer Network software subscription program and its add-on training and support products are not changing.

Developers around the world have found EDN to be a very cost-effective and simple way to access the entire ArcGIS technology and product base for product customization, implementation, as well as the design and development of applications and systems. This has been a popular product and is not going anywhere. Actually, ESRI is committed to making improvements and additions to the subscription program as our leadership position in the geospatial technology industry continues to grow.

Hopefully that should answer a bundle of questions users have been asking about the ESRI Developer Network and the program itself.

James Fee seems to agree:

http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/2008/07/17/esris-edn-sites-purpose/

ESRI’s EDN Site’s “Purpose”

July 17th, 2008 · 3 Comments · GIS

I was wondering just this week the purpose of ESRI’s EDN site now that they’ve got the Resource Centers online. The ArcObjects Development Blog has some of the thinking behind why EDN is just a placeholder now:

Feedback from the user community, as well as our own technology development goals indicate that developers need information about product installation, architecture, administration, and functional usage as much as any other user, and end-users more and more often are making use of information for product customization, components, scripting, programming, and other resources typically associated with application developers. As our technology continues to grow along with the maturity of information technology, the lines between “user” and “developer” continue to blur and overlap. It makes less and less sense to maintain two sites and have users decide which one to use.

I do like the Resource Centers very much, but the more I think about this move, the more it seems like the same old ESRI response; launch a website and then let it languish until it becomes useless. The support site is stuck in 1999, EDN seems like it was stuck in 2005 and now we’ve got the Resource Centers. I can only hope they don’t fall to the same fate as those before it.