What’s New in ArcGIS Online – 10 HOT, New Features

If you were one of the 18,000+ professionals who attended the 2018 ESRIUC, then you’ve heard plenty recently about ArcGIS Online (AGOL). Just prior to the event, Bern Szukalski went to great lengths to share many of the new capabilities of ArcGIS Online. Recent updates in functionality included new smart mapping capabilities, a redesigned organization home page, new ways to mark your content as authoritative, and lots more. 

The ESRIUC was chock full of sessions, presentations, and demos that shared how users can benefit from using ArcGIS Online within their organization – some of the videos have been archived on the Esri360 website. Of particular interest, this video (below) from the UC Monday plenary put a spotlight on some of the new key capabilities of ArcGIS Online and how users can bring their data to life!


So, what else can you accomplish with AGOL? Below you’ll find a list of 10 awesome, new capabilities:

  1. More Smart Mapping and Visualization – Using new Relationship styles, you can explore and visualize two topics within a single map. These styles help you see if two attributes from your data might be related by using bivariate chloropleth mapping.
  2. Better Performance – When visualizing large numbers of features in a map, the size of the data delivered to your browser has been reduced, meaning they display much faster.
  3. Better 3D Scenes – You can now add feature layers with hundreds of thousands of points while maintaining high performance.
  4. More Education – New resources are available for both learning ArcGIS Online and teaching with ArcGIS Online.
  5. More Customization – ArcGIS Vector Tile Style Editor makes it easy for you to create custom styles for any of the Esri vector basemaps, and you can use it on your own vector tile layers.
  6. Updates to Story Maps – Story Maps embedded in websites now display a toolbar that allows viewers to easily share the story with others or open it in full-screen mode without leaving the current page
  7. Organization Page Update – The organization page has been redesigned to help you administer your organization, manage members, and access information quickly.  See The organization page has a new look for more info.
  8. Mobile Updates  – In addition to the mobile browser option (just use your URL), you can now access your organization using ArcGIS Companion, a new mobile app for iOS and Android
  9. Offline Maps – Map authors supporting offline field work can now create map areas from web maps.
  10. Feature Layer Templates – The feature layer template gallery now includes templates that allow you to build empty hosted feature layers and define the layer schema, rather than use predefined schemas.
The Relationship style (Credit: Esri)

Want more ArcGIS Online reading? Stay informed in the latest updates:

Stay informed about changes and updates to ArcGIS Online via the Esri blog, the official @ArcGISonline Twitter account, and by receiving our monthly MapThis newsletter!

If you’re an active user of ArcGISOnline, hopefully you’re also familiar with the applications GEO Jobe has developed to make your AGOL experience even better. Our team of experts have been building on the platform and extending ArcGIS Online for several years. Be sure to check out the ArcGIS Marketplace, where you can access and provision Admin Tools for ArcGIS Online (a must have for the Admin in your org), Mapfolio (create a gateway to your content for the non-GIS professionals), MapLapse (create time-lapse imagery), and more.

See Also the following useful resources:

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