Esri Developer Summit 2023

As in previous years, the Esri Developer Summit took place immediately after the Esri Partner Conference from March 7 to 10, 2023 in Palm Springs. Of course, developers from con terra were present to learn about the latest trends in GIS as well as the most recent innovations in Esri's technology stack and to exchange ideas with the worldwide developer community.

An exciting conference program

Created as a conference by and for developers, the focus of the event was on the application possibilities of the various Esri technologies and their innovations. The plenary session provided valuable insights into the next generations of different developer tools and APIs. A special highlight was the presentation of the Media Layer, which allows to load and spatially reference historical maps in the Map Viewer. Furthermore, the 3D Winter Ressort Demo, which can be used for analysis and planning purposes, left an enormous impression in the Plenary.

In order to ensure a clear and far-reaching knowledge exchange, several hundred hours of workshops and sessions were organized, in which the spotlight was primarily on best practices. The exchange with the developers and product managers of Esri was also not neglected. In the session "Q&A with the ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript Team", for example, we were able to talk directly with the developers and ask helpful questions for our own projects.

In addition, there were many other exciting sessions on ArcGIS Enterprise, ArcGIS Pro, Field Maps, ArcGIS Platform, ArcGIS for Kubernetes, the Calcite Design System and other ArcGIS products. In the Road Ahead for ArcGIS Pro, many interesting new features were introduced. The ArcGIS Pro "Project Sharing" with Portal is certainly only one of the many further developments that we will follow with excitement. Also the presentation of the new product version of ArcGIS Monitor has caused enthusiasm within the Esri community because of its new user experience and the modern design.

During the Developer Spotlight on Friday, various Esri customers got the chance to present their projects. A very entertaining keynote came from Oregon Metro, who presented the way and the added value of Open Data Portals with ArcGIS Hub.

con terra on site

The Esri Developer Summit is an important event for con terra to exchange knowledge and network with other interested developers. Not least for these reasons, we were happy to again support the event as a bronze sponsor this year.

In addition, we contributed a presentation to the Speed Geeking. Under the heading Superpowers for ArcGIS Admins, our colleague Simon Schütte told interested developers more about security.manager – our solution for simple, intelligent and secure data distribution. The lively participation and the great interest on site made it once again clear to us that a fine-grained access control for ArcGIS is an essential topic for the developer community.

Another topic on the agenda of this year's Developer Summit was the CTO Council, in which our Chief Technology Officer Christian Elfers participated as a representative of con terra. For us, this means that we are actively involved in technological developments of Esri and can consider further developments in our solutions at an early stage.

"The Esri Developer Summit is the technology event for us as a GeoIT Integrator and Esri Platinum Partner. At no other place we get such a comprehensive and detailed look into the innovations of the ArcGIS technology and can directly exchange ideas, feedback and requirements with the developers of Esri. Hands-on, proximity and direct communication are key for us to do a really good job and to consult, build and operate the best GeoIT solutions for our customers."

Christian Elfers

All in all, the Esri Developer Summit again provided real added value for con terra and its customers this year. Thanks to the intensive exchange with Esri Inc., we were once again able to bring a lot of new information about ArcGIS, various developer technologies and licensing options back to Münster. Many of the impulses gained on site have already developed into initial ideas on how we can sustainably develop our own customer projects. We are already looking forward to putting the newly gained knowledge into practice.