UC Whiplash?

[Greg_Mattis]

Did anyone else receive UC Whiplash regarding information about ArcGIS Pro and ArcMap depreciation?

Before the UC, I heard from a Customer Advocacy Lead at Esri that ArcMap is going away and then Jack said at the Plenary that it isn't going away and will continue to be supported. Then during the UC, many of the Esri employees that I talked to and presented both in the Expo Hall and at the in Sessions said that ArcMap is going away and even a few of them even provided a date range of 2022 or 2023. But then Jack in the closing session said that it isn't going away and will continue to be supported? Which one is it? It can't be both?

If people have thoughts or also shared my experience I would be interested to know.

[Greg_Mattis]

BrianO‌

We are in the same boat where Named Users are going to price us out. One thing that I realized that we can do that doesn't require named users (and it was recommended to me by Esri Staff at UC) was deploy Portal for ArcGIS behind your own infrastructure and then you only have to have named users for the people that need to either create, edit, or view data in groups outside of that, you can allow "anonymous" access but then control who can access the server whether that be through Active Directory or Web Tier Authentication.

[BrianOevermann]

Greg,

Portal was also suggested to me when I was attempting to migrate from the Flex Viewer to the Web App Builder for the same reasons--chose to implement the Geocortex viewer platform so we could consume our on-premise map server data directly.

I'm unsure of your GIS program structure, but I'm the GIS Coordinator, GIS Analyst, GIS Technician, ArcSDE DBA, ArcGIS Server Administrator, and GIS Web Developer in our city. Adding Portal Administrator to the list is something for which I simply don't have the bandwidth.

I'm sure other cities of similar size are similarly bandwidth constrained. But Esri probably won't notice if we leave them--our yearly tithe is probably akin to a rounding error on their books. Snarky, I admit, but it's difficult to jump on the AGOL/Story Map train when you don't know if you'll even be able to effectively leverage the concurrent use licensing model in a Named User "world" (i.e. the NU model is essentially a single-use licensing model, in my assessment). I don't want my users accustomed to Perrier (tm) when all we can afford is tap. 😕

Brian

[Greg_Mattis]

Brian,

So our set up here is that for a city of 130,000, I am the GIS Analyst and I report to the GIS Supervisor. We have a GIS staff of 2. Like you, we wear many hats. We just started using ArcGIS Online for our public mapping platform and we are still using Geocortex for our internal web mapping platform however we are considering moving off of it because with ArcGIS Pro, you are not able to publish map services directly to your server and what I heard from the Pro team is that they will not be enabling that capability. After talking with Geocortex at the UC and trying to get an idea of where we should look, it was told to me that we would have to use either ArcGIS Online or Portal in order to publish data to our Geocortex using Pro. This led me to question, "Why then have Geocortex?" Here in our city, we are using it for pretty much everything that I can implement with either Portal or Online using the configurable templates, solutions, or Web App Builder.

My only gripe about ArcGIS Online is that if I publish my SDE data to a Web map in ArcGIS Online, it doesn't maintain the SDE connection and therefore doesn't update the data when the SDE geodatabase is updated. I posted an idea about allowing users to configure the data store in ArcGIS Online just as you can configure your data store in ArcGIS Server in order to fix that but I haven't seen any movement on that.

Sorry to digress. As a former Esri employee, I can say that Esri does care about all of their customers. I would recommend reaching out to either you Account Manager or, if you can't get ahold of them, reach out to Chris Cappelli, the director of Global Business Development.

Hope this helps

[BrianOevermann]

Interesting comment regarding publishing (or, rather, not) map services in Pro. Who was in the focus group for Pro features? Obviously nobody that is a user in the "real" world. Ditto with the SDE issue and AGOL.

I agree that Esri cares about customers and our account manager is great. I'll see how things pan out.

OK, back to the original thread of discussion. I've inadvertently steered us onto a tangent...

Brian

[DanCall1]

Make sure to vote for this idea if you haven't already, but from what I've seen and heard so far, esri is not planning on ever adding the ability to publish services to your own ArcGIS Server from ArcGIS Pro.

ETA: Actually there is a question about this in the pre-conference Q&A from the UC, and the answer is "No. The introduction of ArcGIS Enterprise, which integrates Portal for ArcGIS, signifies a shift from the client-server pattern to a Web GIS pattern that takes full advantage of the geoinformation model." No mention of the fact that users will now have to cough up for a Named User license to publish services to their own servers.

[BrianWilson]

I once heard someone say when a lawyer says "forever" it means 30 years.

ALL software will go away, let's be fair here, the only REAL question is "how long is forever"?

"Forever" is shorter in the software world than the lawyer world.

I have been going to ESRI conferences long enough to have a sense that when Jack says "Don't worry, we will support X forever" it means you probably have about 6 years.

In that 6 years ESRI's job is to make Y so attractive that we all just abandon X and maybe AGP version 2 ????. I keep getting drawn back to ArcMap because I need to get stuff done NOW and not suffer the learning curve and feeling ham handed.

While waiting for ArcMap to either load a base map or crash and lose my changes I have time to read GeoNet. Dang. Times up. I wonder if ArcGIS Pro will do this to me? Less often?