We had our Esri UK Scottish Event in Perth this week and Charles Kennelly shared some of what’s planned for the next ArcGIS Online update. Enhancing the administration tools features heavily again but there are also improvements in mapping and visualisation.
Administration enhancements
The plans include user level service credit budgets. This will allow admins to give their users access to things like the analysis tools without the concern that they will use excessive credits. Reporting is also being improved; with additional reports for usage, creation and activity of apps. The status data is going to be downloadable as a csv. The update plan also includes tools for managing large numbers of users – such as allocating administrators to groups of users as the primary contact.
Visualisation and mapping
Smart Mapping already makes it easy to bring out the attribute based information in your data, but you will now be able to map multiple traits – with ArcGIS Online taking care of the calculations for you. The options will include comparing two variables and comparing variables with predominance.
Scene Viewer is going to allow you to create local scenes (the best way to show data in a smaller or local extent) in any geographic or projected coordinate system, i.e. not just Web Mercator. Also, point symbols will have the option to add outlines – with configurable color, width and transparency.
The update is going to include a new mapping option to add halo outlines to labels and text symbols. Additional levels of details to support larger scale mapping are being added to the following basemaps: World Imagery, World Street Map and World Topographic. As part of improving the management and sharing of web maps, the author will now be able to reorder bookmarks and the app gallery is getting a redesign – including a filter based on the purpose of the app.
Feature editing is being refined with a new editing tracking option that allows editors to only view, update and delete the features they add.
Making GIS more accessible
As part of Esri’s ongoing goal to design and implement easily accessible GIS products, the basic viewer is being made more accessible and usable to individuals with disabilities.
New public account users will be able to use social network credentials to sign up and login to their public account. The ability to use social network credentials is also being added to both Crowdsource Manager and Crowdsource Reporter.
A taste of the future
Vector tiles are a new representation that exploits modern web technologies to provide interactive cartography – allowing users to personalise the appearance of the basemap directly on their mobile device or web browser. Beta versions of the Esri vector basemaps are going to be available as vector tile layers and web maps. These will be displayable in the map viewer or through a custom basemap gallery. If you haven’t seen the vector basemap sneak peak from our Annual conference already you can watch it here (it starts at 6:27mins).