An insider's guide to ArcGIS Pro 3.0

An insider's guide to ArcGIS Pro 3.0  

Grab: You can simulate what your map will look like, what the colours will look like for somebody who has different types of colour blindness. And you can make sure that your colour scheme that you're using will still be discernible for a larger map audience.

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Wayne: Welcome to GIS Directions. I'm Wayne Lee-Archer.

Ta: And I'm Ta Taneka. And today we are talking all things ArcGIS Pro 3.0.

Wayne: Ready, steady Pro.

Ta: Ready, steady Pro let's go. Okay, to help us. We've got the man, the myth, the legend, the infamous Esri community commentator and ArcGIS Pro Product manager Kory Kramer is joining us today. Welcome Kory.

Kory: Hey, thank you. I'm really happy to be on the show. Thanks for having me, really excited to talk about ArcGIS Pro 3.0.

Ta: That’s a lot of O’s in there!

Kory: A lot of O’s.

Ta: A lot of O’s. Yeah, but I'm, I'm hoping that this is gonna be jam packed with a lot of ‘W’ so a lot of wins for our community. Yeah I'm excited. Okay, so we all know that ArcGIS Pro has established itself as the desktop mapping standard.

It's got great tools, great features and functions and capabilities. And with each new release Esri's making the move a lot easier for everybody.

Kory: Yeah. So by making the move I sort of take that as talking about ArcMap users, making the move to Pro. it's probably a good time to remember that ArcMap has entered extended support just as of this year. But more than anything, you know, we're here to talk about ArcGIS Pro 3.0, so hopefully today we'll talk a little bit more about what that means for all of us who have already been using Pro for a number of years.

Ta: Okay. Awesome. Thank you so much. All right the main ArcGIS Pro 3.0 information categories that I've come across in my limited research, and the top three things to know.

First and foremost, the easiest and most tactical, that ArcGIS Pro 3.0 requires .NET 6 Desktop Runtime for 64.

So, you have to get that installed early to avoid slowdowns when you're ready to go ArcGIS Pro, am I right?

Kory: Yeah.

Ta: Second thing. It's a breaking change release with considerations around backward compatibility to be made.

And then finally, while ArcGIS Enterprise 11 is the companion release to ArcGIS Pro 3.0, 3.0 plays nicely with previous versions of Enterprise. So you can still move to 3.0. even if your organisation isn't ready for Enterprise 11 yet.

I think those are pretty good topics. I think we can expand on those. What do you think Wayne?

Wayne: I'm sitting here just dumbfounded about the release numbers. I mean, you know, me Ta come on.

Ta: I was waiting for this question.

Wayne: I'm only just learning to count already. And, uh, so what's, what's with the version numbers guys. What's going on here?

Kory: All right. Okay. Well, first of all, I wanna say we didn't run out of numbers.

Wayne: Are you sure? It just sounds a bit weird.

Kory: Anybody who's using Pro today they're on, hopefully on 2.9 something, right? 2.9.3. and it's not like we couldn't have gone to 2.10. that would've been a possibility. But we had a main driver and that was, we wanted to move to .NET 6, right? That's the latest long term supported release version of .NET

Ta: mm-hmm mm-hmm

Kory: And that really sets us up as well as anybody who develops on Pro, sets 'em up for a, a long future of being on the best platform for development. Right? So it was important for us to move to the new .NET and in doing that, it opened up some opportunities for us to make some other changes that we've been waiting on that we weren't able to make until we moved to a major version.

So real quickly, let me just make sure people understand that Pro uses a semantic versioning spec. So what some people might call a major release, like from 2.8 to 2.9, that's a minor release, anything from 2.0. to 2.9 is backwards compatible.

You can go forwards and backwards. You can share documents and all of that. So that's kind of why it's important to note that this actually, the move to 3.0 means something. It actually is a breaking change release. And that's the major change there.

Wayne: Breaking change release. That kind of scares me a little bit. What's so breaking about it?

Ta: Yeah. Is there a cautionary tale here?

Kory: Well, I was gonna say. Breaking change sounds scary. Right.

Wayne: Yeah.

Kory: It does, right. Breaking. Nobody wants their stuff to break.

Wayne: Don't don't break my stuff!

Kory: And so, we have some kind of real straight talk and we wanna let people know what it means. Typically we would say to move from like 2.8 to 2.9, you know, our recommendation is almost always gonna be, yeah, move to the latest release. That's where you wanna be.

Right. We're being a little more conservative with the 3.0, change. Number one. Say utility networks, right?

We wanna make sure that everybody understands that current designated network management release is 2.9, and those users should not move to 3.0. They shouldn't move to 3.0, until there's another supported network management release. So, that's just a quick example for, you know, utility network users.

Another thing though, again, we talked a little bit about breaking changes, what that means it's a lot about backwards compatibility, right?

Ta: Yeah

Kory: So if, somebody upgrades to 3.0 and they create new projects in the 3.0 format, or they bring their 2.x projects into 3.0 and save them. Then they can't automatically just share those projects, those APR X files. They can't just give those to a 2.x user and expect that they'll open because they won't. The document is in a different format. It's in JSON, not XML.

Ta: Oh.

Kory: And a number of other things. Right. There's a lot of things that changed with the .NET upgrade. And so it's not that it's impossible to collaborate, it's just that you would have to package your projects, right?

If you're in 3.0, you create a project package, that's gonna contain 2.x content. And that's how you would have to kind of share with 2.x users.

And so really the best recommendation we have is for users to really understand how they work with others in Pro, like if you're working as part of an organisation and you collaborate with a lot of other Pro users, our recommendation is that you're ready to move everybody to 3.0 at the same time. So that you have that seamless experience.

Ta: Okay. That sounds really good. So new users, go ahead jump straight into ArcGIS Pro 3.0. For our people who've been on this ride since day one, so our existing Pro users, what are the impacts of this change to 3.0?

Kory: You know, important changes with the API, people who develop add-ins, so if you've developed 2.x, add-ins using the .NET as the Pro SDK, those add-ins will need to be converted, and recompiled into 3.0.

There's a conversion process, right? It's not hard. There are steps. There's guidance out there. There's a number of blogs and all of that to help. So it's very doable.

Ta: Mm-hmm.

Kory: But again, it's something that, people will want to be aware of. Your .x add-ins aren't gonna work in 3.0 and vice versa. You create something in 3.0, it's not gonna work in, in 2.x. so those are some of the considerations there.

Again, we just wanna make sure that organisations understand that that the best move is gonna be to move your users at the same time, or if you're a very large organisation, you have different user groups, that at least the groups that work together move them to 3.0, at the same time. You wanna try to avoid having that mixed, like 2.x users and 3.0 users in the same org.

Ta: Okay. Final question, geoprocessing, are there massive changes from two to three?

Kory: Yeah. So there are some changes to consider moving from Pro 2.x to 3.0. Now one of the fundamental changes at 3.0, is that there's a new toolbox format called the ATB X. So it's kind of a new non-binary format. Now the thing is, we introduced it in Pro 2.9 and that actually eases the transition.

So the, the format was always available in 2.9, it just wasn't the default. When we moved to 3.0, we made that the default, but what it means is that that transition is a bit more seamless. Now, some other geoprocessing things to consider, there are some deprecated geocoding tools, so, we're gonna have a blog and some 2.x to 3.0 migration tips.

Ta: Oh cool, yep.

Kory: We're gonna include that in the show notes. And it was really important to us, um, we have to remember that, it's been five years since there's been a major Pro release, meaning a breaking change release.

And the big difference between five years ago and today, is that we have thousands and thousands of Pro users who are doing a hundred per cent of their production work in Pro.  

It was important to us to make sure that we're really informing our Pro users about what they need to know about, because now they're, they're really doing all of their work there. 

Ta: Okay. The most exciting bit. What are the new features and functions in version 3.0?

Kory: All right. So, even though it was a huge focus on the new .NET and getting that all stood up and running, we definitely included a lot of great new features and functionality in 3.0.

The first thing people will notice is a totally redesigned start page. So there's a lot of nice functionality on that start page itself, like being able to search for your recent projects or templates, uh, sorting those. We completely redesigned the learning resources page so it has a lot more space, it's visually totally different than what you will have seen in 2.x. S o those are kind of some, some things you'll notice coming right into 3.0.

For those folks who do do like say Python scripting and analysis, we've got a new package manager with a totally redesigned environment manager.

Ta: Oh cool.

Kory: Yeah. So you can manage your clones, you can update those. So they're not gonna break when you upgrade your Pro versions. I know we've had complaints about that in the past, so that will make that a lot easier.

One of the things that I just, I absolutely know people will really like is in geo Processing tools, if you have a definition query set on a layer or a time filter, range filter, or a selection or any of those things together, when you run your geo Processing tool, when you set it up, it's gonna tell you how many records it's gonna Process.

So gone are the days of running a tool and thinking, oops, why did it only do this thing on five records? And then you go and you have to figure out what happened. So that is something that I know people are, are gonna love. It's gonna keep you from having to like, rerun that tool after you figure out what's going on.

Ta: Yeah, I definitely need that.

Kory: Can I mention a few other things that we're excited about?

Ta: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Kory: So, users will be able to (you can) add maps to reports. I know it sounds like, an obvious one. But you haven't been able to include maps in reports before.

Wayne: That’s a good one.

Kory: You can save a web scene without changing the item ID. So this is something that we've had for web maps for a few releases, I think.

And so now we can do the same with web scenes. You can bring a web scene in, make changes and then just save it. And you're good to go.

Ta: Oh, that's awesome.

Kory: And this was a big request from users wanting to create a spatial join without creating a new feature class. And so you can do that now...

Ta: Oh.

Kory: kind of in a temporary way, just like you would with a table join.

Ta: Yeah, that's true.  

Kory: And then when you're done, you can just remove the join and you haven't created a new, a new feature class.

Kory: And the final thing is a really nice accessibility improvement that we added, which is called, colour vision deficiency simulator.

Ta: Oh, wow.

Kory: Yeah, when you're creating a map, you can basically simulate what your map will look like, what the colours will look like for somebody who has different levels of colour blindness, different types of colour blindness. And you can make sure that, that your colour scheme that you're using will still be discernible for a larger map audience. So that's something we we're really happy about.

Wayne: I love that. I've worked in the, the web accessibility side of things in the past. So there you go, Ta, I'm sold. I'm going Pro 3.0! yep. Done. I'm onboard!

Kory: People are gonna be excited about that one.

Ta: I did wanna mention one thing. So you said that we have a redesigned start page and that includes like a whole bunch of Quickstart tutorials and discovery parts, I love that because a couple of years ago I went to Redlands, I was part of a One Esri bootcamp, and we gave feedback about what would the ideal experience or user experience be for future states of ArcGIS Pro.

Kory: Mm-hmm.

Ta: So this is fantastic to see that, yeah, a lot of the work that we put, as just community users and distributors has been heard and you guys have implemented it. So yeah, another great example of just being part of the user community, being able to share your ideas. They really do look and listen. It's really great.

Kory: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm happy to hear that. And you know, a lot of the things that we talked about, they came directly from user ideas on ArcGIS ideas. So, you know, in Pro 3.0, we're gonna see 50 plus ideas directly from our users.

Ta: That's awesome. That's 50 individual items that have been either added or updated or changed. Alrighty Kory, could we summarize three items to be aware of and three reasons to upgrade to Pro 3.0.

Kory: Okay, so, the quick tips, right? One, like you said, at the very beginning, Ta, make sure that either you or your admin updates your machine to the .NET six desktop runtime. Right. That's just gonna make sure you don't hit any slowdowns when you are ready to install 3.0.

I would say number two for our ArcMap users, make sure you check out the timeline on ArcMap continued support. We're gonna provide a link to that. Again, we just want people to be aware of the support life cycle on ArcMap.

And, three, for our Pro users, check out the migration resources that we're gonna provide. And then again, the extensive “what's new” documentation, because it goes well beyond just ideas, and there's, there's a ton of new stuff in there.

Wayne: Fantastic. So that's it folks, some short, sharp, and immediately usable features that'll help you make your desktop transition to Pro 3.0 an absolute breeze.

Ta: Ready steady Pro 3.0. Alrighty. A huge shout out to Kory Kramer. ArcGIS Pro Product manager and personal friend for his insights and advice.

And to help you get started with these tips that we've given you, we've added all the resources that we've spoken about to our website. That's GISDirectionspodcast.com.au, including a link to the free migrating to Pro onboarding program, as well as all of the migrating to Pro 3.0 resources mentioned. Plus all the information you'll need to get ready for ArcGIS Pro 3.0.

Now we'd also love to hear any tips from you guys, the ArcGIS user community. So jump onto the website to send them through.

If you do have ideas that you'd like to see implemented in future versions of ArcGIS Pro, please head over to the ideas.arcgis.com site have a look and a browse and add some of your own. Let us know, and we'll up vote as many as we can.

Wayne: I'm hitting the up-vote button as I speak. Kory, thanks for joining us today.  

Kory: Oh, thank you guys so much, really happy to join you. And, uh, I look forward to seeing everybody in Pro 3.0.

Wayne: Ready steady Pro 3.0 Ta!

Ta: Happy mapping