ArcGIS Online For Organizations Is Coming To UWGB
I'm told that our long awaited subscription to ArcGIS Online for Organizations will be activated within the next day or two. The Esri folks often refer potential users to the Salem Oregon Map Gallery for a nice example of how ArcGIS Online can be used to document and develop spatial information for a large organization. The following excerpt from an interview with Esri's Michael Gould furnishes some insights on its use in an academic setting:
"ArcGIS Online is the cloud computing-based mechanism that can serve simple geoenabled apps to many of the people (including students) at the bottom of the pyramid and connect scientists and other GIS users in the middle tier, enabling greater data sharing. GIS experts at the top are beginning to program custom applications that exploit the global content and connectivity that ArcGIS Online allows. Many people still have not taken a deep dive into ArcGIS Online and therefore do not comprehend its possibilities for the future of GIS (including GIScience) education. It is much more than another map tile engine to compare with Google Maps. It feeds on the experience and requirements of GIS experts around the world and helps connect GIS users to one another. It is at once a spatial data infrastructure, social network, and engine not only for visualizing maps but also for integrating them into a wide variety of geospatial applications as well as with social media, blogs, etc. People who see it only as a map portal need to have a second look and return often, because feature releases happen on a rolling schedule (i.e., constantly). Also, we recently announced that Esri is providing a privileged level of access, called ArcGIS Online for Organizations, to all 900-plus universities that currently have a campus site license and to school districts and statewide license holders. This will allow even more possibilities to create and manage protected groups of administrators, teachers, researchers, and students and select which georesources are shared with whom."
I intend to use this web page to report our progress in implementing the product over the next several months. I've started a mailing list of committed and potential users. Emails to list members will be the primary tool for calling attention to new developments - Mike Stiefvater
ArcGIS Online Test Drive - Posted 20 August, 2012
Anyone interested in trying out the product should do 2 things. First, go to Esri.com and get a "Global Account". When you are asked for an email address, furnish your campus email. Second, contact one of the designated administrators (for a while anyway, that would be me) and ask to be added to the "uwgbtest" group - Mike Stiefvater
ArcGIS Online Local Example - Posted 17 August, 2012
We started messing around with the personal version of ArcGIS Online several months ago. We created a test map
whose main purpose was to display information on campus survey markers, but since then we added some Nicolet National Forest Bird points to see how that might look - Mike Stiefvater