Some of you may have woken up to cold weather, perhaps even some snow, others may have woke up to a warm, sunny day. One thing is for sure though, everyone woke up to be greeted by a pretty big December update to ArcGIS Online. Word from Esri’s Bern Szukalski has it that this release includes updates and new capabilities for hosted web layers, configurable apps, apps for field and office, administration, accounts, and much more. We look briefly at the main touch points in this update.

- New Arcade for Map viewer – a new lightweight expression language introduced at this release. You can author, edit, or apply custom expressions written in Arcade when styling and labeling feature layers in the map viewer. Additional map viewer enhancements include updates to attribute tables, time animations, dynamic labeling, route generation and more.
- Point cloud data can now be visualized on the web using a new layer type, point cloud scene layers, optimized for fast display of many kinds of 3D sensor data, including LiDAR.
- Vector tile layers can now be used in 3D, offering much faster loading. They can be brought into your scenes as operational layers or as basemaps.
- A new gallery has been added with 2D marker and 3D object symbols while New drawing styles use attributes to drive the visualization of point layers.
- The camera animation for point-to-point flights has been enhanced to provide a smoother experience
- A new Join Features tool allows you to transfer attributes from one layer or table to another based on spatial or attribute relationships
- New Find Outliers tool creates a map showing any statistically significant clusters and spatial outliers present
- Hosted Feature Layers – When you publish data using ArcGIS Online, the hosting is provisioned for you. Web, desktop, and mobile apps can access your ArcGIS Online hosted layers from anywhere on the Internet, with you controlling access and sharing – see also more about hosted feature layer views
- create multiple views of hosted feature layers. This allows you to publish your data once, then create tailored views for different audiences.
- Configurable apps provide an easy and fast way to go from a web map to an application, with no coding required
Bonus… Story Map Journal and Story Map Series now support dragging and dropping local images from your computer directly into your stories.

There’s much more in this update. To get the complete low-down be sure to read Bern’s blog post on the Esri blog, What’s new in ArcGIS Online, Dec. 2016
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