Katrina Morgan
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Katrina Morgan
20 January 2017 10:44
Katrina Morgan
FW: Q4 Technical Update from Eamonn Doyle, CTO
Esri Ireland Technical Update
Q4 2016
Eamonn Doyle, CTO, Esri Ireland
This is the final Technical Bulletin for 2016 and I want to use it to announce ArcGIS 10.5 which was released today.
ArcGIS 10.5 This is a very big release, our biggest in many years, with significant new capabilities being added to the platform, many new applications and a new licensing model to help extend access to your WebGIS to many more users throughout your respective organisation’s. This release is so big in fact that we have decided to rename components of the platform. Don’t worry – it’s still called ArcGIS! However, ArcGIS for Server, which as you know includes ArcGIS for Server and Portal for ArcGIS, now becomes ArcGIS Enterprise. At 10.5 ArcGIS Enterprise is a full WebGIS capability for running on your own infrastructure 1
(hosted or cloud). In this respect is very comparable to ArcGIS Online which is a full WebGIS for running on our infrastructure as a SaaS proposition. So, in my mind it’s all ArcGIS – think ArcGIS Enterprise for internal use and ArcGIS Online for external use. The functionality, capability and user experience will be similar whichever you use.
WebGIS
You will notice that I’m using the term “WebGIS” – but what does that mean? By “WebGIS” I mean a fully integrated desktop, server and portal infrastructure where the portal component is federated with both the desktop and the server component in a single security model over https and the various data stores have been implemented. When you think about it, that’s the way ArcGIS Online is implemented. In ArcGIS Online, Named Users interact with the system in Roles that grant them capabilities. When Users create resources (feature services, tile services, webmaps etc.) as a logged in Named User on ArcGIS Pro, they create them on ArcGIS Online itself and the system stores and maintains those resources. The User does not need to know anything about the underlying Geodatabase technology. Users can share those resources with others that are known to the system or they can make them public to anonymous users. If Users maintain resources on the system using its client apps such as ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online Viewer, Collector etc. the system itself becomes the master of those resources. The resources and any edits or updates are associate with the relevant Users. ArcGIS Enterprise adopts the same approach with the caveat that some resources may still be maintained in local Geodatabases and shared via registered data stores with ArcGIS Server acting as a hosting server. However, using ArcGIS Enterprise it’s also possible, and just as valid to, publish to the inbuilt hosted data store from say ArcGIS Pro or Esri Maps for Office and not have to worry about managing an enterprise Geodatabase instance.
In an ArcGIS Enterprise WebGIS, there are a variety of data stores. These data stores, store your data in an appropriate form to enable the system turn that data into web services. The data stores continue to include ArcGIS Server working against a registered Enterprise Geodatabase as will be familiar to you, but they also include PostgreSQL being managed by ArcGIS for high capacity and performance feature services, ElasticSearch for big data, CouchDB for 3D data and others. These data stores are accompanied by new server types and new service types that allow the WebGIS client apps visualize and analyse these diverse types of data. At 10.5 we will be adding server side components for big data visualisation and analysis, a parallel geoprocessing server and a raster analytics server.
The key point here is that as the platform expands the new capabilities are added to the WebGIS at the Portal tier not at the ArcGIS Server tier as was the case in the past with Server Object Extensions etc. And over the past few releases this has been happening incrementally to the extent that the WebGIS is now completely Portal centric rather than simply being an ArcGIS Server GIS Services Bus interacting with a client side viewer.
What’s coming at ArcGIS Enterprise 10.5?
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ArcGIS Enterprise 10.5 introduces many new capabilities. There will be comprehensive “What’s New” sections with each of the WebGIS component and apps that will provide detail on every new capability. I’m not going to attempt to replicate all that. But I want to give you an overview of the key new WebGIS elements, which are; 
Insights will be available a s a Premium App with ArcGIS Enterprise 10.5. It is a highly interactive data visualisation, exploration and analysis app similar to, e.g. Tableau, but with the addition of powerful geographical methods and robust spatial statistics. Insights lets you explore your data in a very intuitive and visual way by building a workbook of maps, charts and tables. These are managed and configured as cards with each one giving a live snapshot of the spatial analysis. The cards are interactive and linking them allows you to discover and explore the relationships in your data. 
GeoAnalytics Server in an integrated server side capability in ArcGIS Enterprise. It enables client applications such as ArcGIS Pro and the Portal Viewer very rapidly carry out standard analytic functions (e.g. Aggregate Points, Find Hot Spots, Create Buffers etc.) on very large data sets So think of your favorite ArcToolbox functions on steroids! These functions are accessed directly from the Geoprocessing menu and execute directly on large feature sets in the ArcGIS Enterprise data store. They return results as Layers to the Portal. GeoAnalytics turns geoprocessing jobs that might take days or hours with ArcToolbox into minutes or seconds. 
RasterAnalyitcs does for large scale raster Geoprocessing what GeoAnalytics does for large feature sets. Consider for instance running a sensitivity analysis on a 10m grid for the entire country. RasterAnalytics enables you to do this almost instantly by using Image Server to expose raster function chains in a new distributed computing architecture. Again, the results are stored as new Layers in your WebGIS. Each of these capabilities will be dependent on a full WebGIS deployment of ArcGIS Enterprise. If you remain on an earlier version or if you implement ArcGIS Enterprise in the “hybrid” ArcGIS for Server and ArcGIS Online pattern or the “loosely coupled” Portal for ArcGIS pattern you will be licensed for these capabilities but will not have access to them. Workflow Changes
Adoption of the full WebGIS pattern will involve some workflow changes especially in the Share or publishing workflow. ArcGIS Pro 1.4 and ArcGIS Enterprise 10.5 bear the same relationship to each other as did ArcMap and ArcGIS for Server at earlier versions. Just as ArcMap was used to publish services to ArcGIS Server, so ArcGIS Pro will now be used to publish "Layers" to ArcGIS Enterprise. Layers can then be used throughout the remainder of the ArcGIS Platform. The Layer is not just the web service as was the case with earlier versions it also includes all the defining metadata, the rendering and symbolization, edit templates, smart mapping, extent, visibility settings, zoom scale and popup definition. This applies equally for Map Layers (2D) and Scene Layers (3D). 3
Map Layers are further catagorised into Map Image Layers (i.e. dynamic map services), Tile Layers (i.e. cached map services) and Feature Layers (i.e. feature services) and Image Layers. How you define your Map Layer in the Share workflow becomes very important. For example, if you want to share an editable Feature Layer but retain the data in a local enterprise Geodatabase then you must register that Geodatabase with the Portal.
When equipped with the GeoAnalytics Server the workflow for Geoprocessing will change for certain GeoAnalytics enabled functions. These will now be accessed from the GeoAnlaytics Menu in ArcGIS Pro or the Analysis context menu in the Portal Viewer.
The key change here is that workflows are becoming ArcGIS Pro centric and ArcMap is playing less of a role. Just following the 10.5 release ArcGIS Pro will move to version 1.4. At version 1.4, ArcGIS Pro is functionally equivalent to ArcMap in all but a very few esoteric respects. I have been using ArcGIS Pro for short while now and it’s very easy to become comfortable with it and with the new workflows I mention. I’d recommend that you all consider moving to ArcGIS Pro as soon as you can to take advantage of what is a beautiful and powerful new professional GIS desktop client.
Licensing
Most of you have been using ArcGIS Online for some time now and you will know that it is licensed based on having an Organisational Account that provides access to the infrastructure and a cohort of Named Users that enable individual take advantage of the capabilities of that infrastructure. Additional annual Named Users can be purchased in bundles.
ArcGIS Enterprise WebGIS is licensed in a similar way. The infrastructure is licensed as a package including server components that provision geospatial capabilities and a cohort of Named Users that have access to those capabilities. Additional annual Named Users can be purchased in bundles.
Up until there was only one type of Named User – a full Named User if you will. This Named User was granted access to the full capabilities of ArcGIS and all its applications. All the value of ArcGIS was encapsulated in the Named User license irrespective of whether the individual to whom that Named User identity was allocated actually used all that value. The cost of these full Named Users was reflective of that value.
Many of you have asked for a change to this because you have Users in your organization to whom you wish to grant Named User access but who won’t exploit all the value of a full Named User. As of 10.5 we will introduce a tiered Named User structure. A Level 1 Named User will have access to the WebGIS with a known identity and will have view only type rights over Content Items shared with the organisation or specific Groups to which they belong but they will not have access to higher levels of functionality. These Level 1 Named Users will be available at a new low price point on both ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Online. Level 2 Named Users will continue to enjoy full access to all the capabilities of the ArcGIS as before. How do I get the new release?
All ArcGIS for Server Customers currently on maintenance will receive ArcGIS Enterprise. There will be a straightforward upgrade path. However, if you have not, as many of you have not, yet adopted a WebGIS architecture i.e. a fully federated ArcGIS Server and 4
Portal with integrated data stores, you will not be able to take advantage of the new capabilities at this release. As we move into 2017 and as you decide to upgrade Esri Ireland will provide upgrade packages to upgrade your ArcGIS for Server and/or Portal for ArcGIS based implementations to full WebGIS implementations on ArcGIS Enterprise with the federated security model and integrated data store. Is there anything else I need to know?
Yes. This has been mentioned before in previous technical bulletins. All ArcGIS for Server sites need to move to support both http and https, or alternatively https only. Many of you have or are already in the process of doing this and I would encourage anyone else to follow our repeated recommendation and do likewise. Using http only exposes you to security vulnerabilities and you will start to experience functional issues as other sites on which you may depend migrate to https. Upgrade to https requires you to acquire a CA Certificate and involves some time from our Professional Services division to implement. I suspect that https only has a limited support horizon and most large web players are discontinuing support for https only or dropping functionality where users access http only services. I recommend that you use the upgrade to ArcGIS 10.5 as an opportunity to implement https.
ArcMap VBA compatibility retires
The upcoming ArcGIS Desktop 10.5 release will not include the Microsoft VBA compatibility setup. Microsoft have stopped providing fixes or troubleshooting Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications. In light of this, Esri can no longer support distribution of VBA. If you are affected by this please contact us directly.
Finally
I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you and your families a Happy Christmas and to thank you for your great work and continued support during 2016. Eamonn Doyle
15/12/16
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