New Zealand ESRI User Conference

This year User Conference was in Rotorua, from 7th - 9th November. The venue was Rotorua Convention Centre.

Full agenda for this conference is available on the New Zealand ESRI Users Group web site on section regarding the conference. This year we had slightly less attendees, about 290 compared to 300+ last year.

As usual conference started with golf tournament (in which I don't participate) on Tuesday. For me conference is very busy time, I am helping other people from Eagle Technology Group to get things up and running. One of the things is getting the gear to the Rotorua. Just to make it more fun, we had a flat tyre. That was just the beginning of odd things. Second item on my list is getting the Internet OR LAN connections sorted with venue people. Don't ask me why they don't have LAN and Internet but they don't.  At Wednesday midday we had everything sorted and working nicely (thanks Jithen!).

Unfortunately, I can comment on the content of the presentations since I didn't attend any. This includes presentation of the key speaker - Clint Brown, director of software products at ESRI. This is because I was on the duty in "Doctor's Office" where we try to provide on the spot answers and demos of anything users can think of. It is very easy to spend an hour talking to users about all sorts of things related to ArcGIS, ESRI and GIS in general.

I did present this year, two presentations actually. The first one was titled "Managing imagery in ArcGIS" and the second one was "ArcSDE to ArcGIS Basic". Slides for all presentations should be available on the web site some time soon (when we get them from presenters).

First presentation was about issues in handling images and suggesting procedures/steps to handle images.

Second one was little bit more confusing. In 9.2 release ArcSDE does not exist as a product but it is part (read technology) of ArcGIS Server. Equivalent of ArcSDE 9.1 is ArcGIS Server Basic (AGSB) and Mark Thompson and I tried to show what else is comprising AGSB and what else it has to offer. In short, you get everything from ArcSDE plus:

• ability to create geodata services
• publish personal geodatabase
• publish file geodatabase
• publish personal/workgroup ArcSDE geodatabase
• mange services using ArcCatalog or ArcGIS Server Manager

Of course there is more but for usual general info check ESRI's web site.

That is all for now. I'll update the report with more details and some photos soon.