10 Awesome New Things You'll Find in ArcGIS 10.5 and ArcGIS Online

Chances are that if you follow Esri staffer accounts on social media that you heard that ArcGIS 10.5 has been released, this also includes an update to the functionality provided in ArcGIS Online. According to Esri, this release includes updates and new capabilities for hosted web layers, configurable apps, apps for field and office, administration, accounts, and much more. There’s plenty of new stuff here, with updates affecting most of the products and solutions, including vertical market releases.

A few of the noteworthy new things you’ll find in the latest releases include:

ArcGIS Enterprise – a new name!

ArcGIS Enterprise is the new name of the ArcGIS for Server product family that includes ArcGIS Server, Portal for ArcGIS, ArcGIS Data Store, and ArcGIS Web Adaptor. According to Esri, the most profound change that ArcGIS Enterprise introduces is the idea of the server role. Server roles unlock capabilities within the ArcGIS Server software component. From our single server software component, you can spin up five different servers, each offering its own distinct set of capabilities, all of which can be scaled completely independently from each other.

New in ArcGIS Online

The ArcGIS Online December update features advanced GIS capabilities, more improvements to the user experience, and better ways to manage your account and share work. Esri Vector Tile Basemaps will be exiting the beta stage, and they feature nine styles—a dark and light gray canvas, three street variations, terrain with labels, navigation, topographic, and an imagery hybrid—from a single tile service. For point layers in the scene viewer, it is now possible to incorporate both 2D and 3D symbology. ArcGIS Online has added the ability to create new organizational accounts using credentials from social networks, such as Facebook and Google.

vector tile maps — *The styles include a dark and light gray canvas, three street variations, terrain with labels, navigation, topographic, and an imagery hybrid (Image credit: esri)*

Insights for ArcGIS

Insights for ArcGIS is a new spatial analytics experience that brings fast, powerful data exploration and discovery. Insights blends spatial and non-spatial data, so you’re free to bring in and immediately start to work with enterprise databases such as SQL Server and SAP HANA, geodatabases, Excel spreadsheets, and any data that can be brought into your ArcGIS system as a feature layer

ArcGIS Geoanalytics Server

ArcGIS GeoAnalytics Server is designed for space-time analysis on massive vector and tabular data and can connect to your data in HDFS, Hive, existing ArcGIS data, and your local file shares

Arcade

Arcade is a new expression language for ArcGIS that allows you to do more across the ArcGIS Platform in a consistent way. One of the great things about ArcGIS is its ability to run everywhere on nearly any device, whether that is on the web, desktop or mobile powered by a rich set of apps. Enhancements are planned but as of today you can start getting familiar with Arcade by taking advantage of it in Pro, ArcGIS Online and through your own apps using the JavaScript and Runtime SDKs. Arcade is described in more detail in this article

Named User Levels

A new Level 1 Named User is in addition to the Level 2 Named User (formerly called Named User) and is a cost-effective way to share those important information products in your organization without giving up control over what information is seen by whom and how it is used. Read more about named user levels here

What Can This New Level 1 Named Users Do?

View private content shared within your organization
Participate in private groups (invitation only)
Access subscription and premium ArcGIS content that is shared as part of a map, scene, or app
Use configured apps (read only)
Access basemaps, search for content, and use geosearch

What Can This New Level 1 Named Users Not Do?

Create any kind of content
Edit or make new map
Share content to their organization or the public
Create groups
Manage other users, groups, or content
Perform analysis

Survey 123

This is the 11th and final update to Survey 123 this year according to Esri. The update includes more sharing. Starting at version 1.10, the Collaborate tab has been expanded, so you can define which groups within your ArcGIS Organization will have access to your survey results through the Data and Analyze tabs. Any user you grant access to your survey results will be able to log into the Survey123 web site and have read-only access to the survey results. Additionally, with this release they are introducing support for social logins, so field users can use their Gmail (Google+) and Facebook accounts to log into the Survey123 app. With the 1.10 release, you can now easily generate a survey from an existing hosted feature service. This new feature in Survey123 Connect replaces previous workflows where you had to manually create your XLSForms.

Crowdsource Apps

There is an array of updates to the crowdsourcing apps. The Crowdsource Reporter now supports adding documents within comments as long as attachments exist on the related comment table. The Crowdsource Manager app now supports displaying video within the media carousel

ArcGIS API for JavaScript 4.2

The ArcGIS API for JavaScript 4.2 is available, introducing new widgets, smart mapping in 2D and 3D, vector tiles in 3D, support for Arcade, and new events in the MapView and SceneView. The Crowdsource Polling app also now supports adding documents within comments, as long as attachments exist on the related comment table.

More data in Esri Basemaps

This basemap release includes over 20 communities that have provided new and updated map layers to Esri’s Online Basemaps. They include Japan, the Catalonia region of Spain, and select cities and counties in the United States

Note, according to this official document (PDF) over 500 bug issues have been addressed in this release.