Our blog has moved address

As part of the Esri Australia website redevelopment, this blog has now moved to esriaustralia.com.au/blog

Here, you can find out what’s trending, learn from industry innovators, check out fascinating smart maps, and stay informed with topical tech talk.

Visit our new blog regularly, or even better, subscribe to receive updates (you can do this at the bottom of any post), and let us tell you when the best articles are live.

And if you want to reference any of our old content, don’t worry – you can still access this blog for the next few months.

Thanks for stopping by. We hope you enjoy our new site!

The best of the Esri UC – brought Down Under

What if you could experience the world’s largest geospatial event – the Esri User Conference – without needing to travel to San Diego, or watch hours of footage online?

Better yet – what if information on the latest ArcGIS advancements was delivered in an Australian context, with local experts providing live commentary and answering all your questions?

Well, we have some good news for you…

Five minutes with an Esri Australia trainer – Angus Hooper

Take a moment to get to know one of the stars in our training team.

What are you responsible for?

In my role as a consultant within Customer Care at Esri Australia, I work to ensure our clients are learning best practise to help leverage GIS in their business processes. I also work within the technical support space on topics such as ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Online, Collector for ArcGIS and Python.

Buy now, train later

It’s that time of year again, leading up to the end of financial year, when we are tallying up our costs and expenditures, and getting our budgets in order.

If you are one of the lucky ones to find a few extra gold coins left in the piggy bank, and want to make the most of your remaining funds, then we have a solution for you.

Purchase Esri Australia Learning and Services units! These units provide you with access to training and professional services as you need them – they are similar to gift vouchers where you can purchase them now and use them as you need them over the next 12 months.

Thoughts from the front row

Over the past two days, I had the pleasure of being MC for the first two cities of the Directions Live 2016 roadshow as we kicked off the tour in Melbourne and Adelaide.

As the MC I got a front-row seat for all of the Esri Australia and guest presentations, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to jot down some thoughts on the key themes that stood out for me. So here goes …

More technology, more ideas, more connections

Following the conclusion of our ArcGIS seminar series each year, we immediately look to the future and at ways we can improve the roadshow. How do we continue to make Directions LIVE better for our user community, and give past attendees another reason to return?

We make our changes based on the feedback we receive, and this year that has led us to expand the event program even further, with more content across the board.

Five minutes with an Esri Australia trainer – Nathaniel Meyer

Nathaniel Meyer – Senior Consultant, Esri Australia

Meet Nathaniel Meyer – one of Esri Australia’s senior consultants – and a specialist in ArcGIS for Desktop and geodatabases. To help you get to know Nathaniel better, he spent five minutes in the hot seat answering our questions.

EA: Tell us about your role as a senior consultant/trainer at Esri Australia – what are you responsible for?
NM: I’m a member of the training team where I am responsible for developing new eLearning content and mentoring our extended training family. I am also responsible for delivering the geodatabase and desktop courses.

EA: What do you love most about your job?
NM: The opportunity to constantly learn new things, working within a team of passionate GIS professionals, and being able to get out and about to meet clients and help them improve their GIS skills.

Making technical training count – customised learning and capitalising on momentum

Since joining the Esri Australia training team, I have had the privilege of working with many of our largest and longest standing clients, in addition to new clients migrating from other GIS technologies, or embracing location analytics for the first time.

The common thread here though is that regardless of an organisation’s experience with location, every client I speak to is eager to embrace enterprise-wide change – a point that particularly rings true when organisations strengthen their software deployment with Esri Australia technical training.

When a map isn’t the answer

Maps are everywhere. We have them in our cars and our phones and on websites from AirBnB to Woolworths to our health insurer.

I love maps. They’re beautiful. They can help reveal new patterns and relationships in data that couldn’t be discovered in any other way and they help us find the way to that elusive new secret whiskey bar.

But the map isn’t always the right tool to help you understand what’s around you.

Sometimes we’re too map-centric. Sometimes we need to switch to a more location-centric view of the world.

Launch a location platform that takes off

As we begin a new year, are you thinking of how to communicate the benefits of using location information to get GIS to really take off in your organisation? Have you got your ArcGIS Organisational account ready to go? If so, a series of new publications are now available to help you get the most from your ArcGIS platform.

The Launch Guide shows you how to prepare for and begin using location information. It provides the steps to help launch a location platform for your organisation and a strategy for successfully adopting location technology within your organisation. It contains: