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Spatially Adjusted informs us ESRI's widely used ArcGIS has its service pack #4 available. In fact, ArcIMS and ArcSDE SP4 are also available. Also of interest, the GIS CAD Interoperability blog discuss the new elements of SP4 in regards to CAD, an excerpt: "Starting with the ArcGIS 9.2 Service Pack 4 release, the EXPORT TO CAD tool will honor the coordinate system defined in the projection file (.PRJ) of the target output CAD file."

Spatially Adjusted has an informative entry on what's happening for the upcoming ArcGIS Server 9.3 and ArcSDE. From the post: "ArcSDE finally rides into the sunset. Even though technically ArcSDE has been replaced at 9.2, it was still a separate product. Now at 9.3 it will become fully integrated into ArcGIS Server. [...] ArcGIS supports older versions of the Geodatabase. At 9.3, ArcGIS can connect and create geodatabases (personal, file) back to 9.0. This means you won’t need to keep older versions of the geodatabase around to share with others." I copied several related stories below.

The Fuzzy Tolerance blog notes a pretty interesting, but unofficial observation. From their summary : "If you’ve got people on ArcIMS projects, it’s probably time to bail if it’s early or say “that and no more” and stop investing time and money in it. If you’re an ESRI-only shop, snuggle up with a dozen or so ArcObjects diagrams and a box of tissues. If not, there are a lot of great open source solutions you can try. But either way, every dollar you spend today on an ArcIMS project will mean two dollars spent in a year or so converting it to something else."

This information comes from observations noticed at the ESRI developer summit this year. Head on over to the Fuzzy Tolerance blog to get an in depth report about these observations.

The Mandown blog has an entry titled "ArcGIS 9.3 To Offer Full Support For Microsoft Windows Vista". From their summary : "Redlands, California—ESRI's upcoming ArcGIS 9.3 software release will fully support the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system across the ArcGIS family of products. The new support now makes ArcGIS fully compatible with Vista for increased reliability."

For the full press announcement, and the relative links, please visit the Mandown blog.

Spatially Adjusted informs us the ArcGIS 9.2 Service Pack 5 is now available and here's the official list of addressed issues for ArcGIS (ArcSDE, ArcIMS, etc are also updated). And in addition to lxnyce's round up of ESRI developer summit 2008 news, Spatially Adjusted provided regular coverage, including his reflections: "Well I think most would agree, the 2008 DevSummit was one of the best. There was tons of new stuff to learn about, much more attendees, more ESRI staff, better layout of the conference (the Community Center was particularly good) and better session (and more of them)."

From The Memory Leak blog : "Something doesn’t make sense here. I often have heard ESRI describe Web2.0 mapping as useful, but not really GIS. To be true GIS, ESRI claims, geoprocessing capability must be provided. But then when I look at ArcGIS Online (Beta), I don’t see any geoprocessing services. I thought I saw this demo’d somewhere, but don’t see anything. I suppose ESRI is working on this - otherwise the name should be changed to ArcData Online."

For some interesting ideas on the issues of geoprocessing, please visit The Memory Leak blog.

The mandown blog informs us about the changes to the ESRI website. From their summary "With the release of ArcGIS Server 9.3, you can mash up GIS-based Web services from ArcGIS Server with other Web content. Try the examples below to see how you can use the ArcGIS JavaScript API to integrate ArcGIS Server into your Web applications."


Please head on over to the mandown blog for more information.