GeoDesign - and Ouch!

Let’s Call Esri’s ArcGIS Online What It Is — A Spade

from James Fee GIS Blog by James Fee

So the Esri GeoDesign Summit is in full session, or at least we know it is because at least two people showed up.

Lets look at it this way, SharePoint is Microsoft’s Content Management System. Imagine if Microsoft only allowed you to upload Microsoft file formats. Crazy right? But that is what ArcGIS Online is. ArcGIS Online is what it is, an Esri Content Management System that lets you share Esri files with other Esri users.

I don’t fault Esri for creating such a product, they feel there is money to be made doing this. But let’s not pretent it is a GIS content management system because it just doesn’t support open standards let alone other formats such as TAB, DWG or whatever Intergraph is doing these days.

It is an Esri Content Management System. But what does that really mean? Basically Esri’s ArcGIS Online is Google My Maps, but with $10,000 client software.

 Creating a map to share with Esri’s online APIs doesn’t make it content management. There is no geneology of data, no lifecycle to the product. Just some simple polygons or pushpins on a map that at its core isn’t what customers want. The biggest reason why Esri is pushing ArcGIS Online so much is that Google Earth Builder is a direct play toward some vision that Esri has to where GIS may go in 2012/2013. The problem with both solutions is that they don’t actually manage your data that goes into your products (the pushpin maps you share during GIS Day 2012). The important data is still strewn across hard drives and servers in your organization just hoping that it will never get lost. That doesn’t sound like progress to me and the focus is not on workflows but some mythical federal contract that the big boys are fighting over.