Top 3 reasons to START using ArcGIS Pro now! Reason #3 revealed.
If I were in your shoes, I would stop waiting until the day you feel you can turn ArcGIS Desktop (ArcMap) off for good, because you might be missing out on awesome benefits of ArcGIS Pro you could use right away. Read this blog post series (1 of 3), to find out why I think you should start using ArcGIS Pro now because it could impact your work, positively.
Before I get on to revealing the top 3 reasons I gathered from Canadian clients, I would like to ask a very important question:
Did you know that ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Desktop (ArcMap) can both be installed and activated on the same machine?
I bet many of you did not know this. Well, secret revealed!
With both activated at your fingertips and by opening only one at a time, you could use the best application for maximum efficiency, depending on the task at hand. Why limit yourself to one or the other when you could have both?
To make sure you can activate ArcGIS Pro, start with this 3-step checklist:
- Make sure your ArcGIS Desktop (ArcMap) license is current on maintenance
- Check your hardware compatibility against ArcGIS Pro system requirements
- Get approval from your organization’s License Administrator
If you have all 3 checked, you are ready to find out why you should start using ArcGIS Pro now.
Why Start Using Pro Now
Reason #3: Leverage Enhanced Spatial Analysis Capabilities
Many clients have mentioned to me and my colleagues that the newest analysis tools have convinced them to activate ArcGIS Pro and once they’ve tried it, they never went back.
I could not pinpoint “the” main capability to highlight because there are too many new great ones and more options than ever to use them, but I summarized them by categories in the list of favourites below.
Favourite Capabilities
The speed and reliability of ArcGIS Pro when performing analysis provided with the multi-thread processing is incomparable with the ArcGIS Desktop (ArcMap) experience. Some analysis tools run in seconds compared to minutes and hours while you can continue working on other items. Talk about gain in productivity!
The pay-as-you-go Spatial Analysis tools from ArcGIS Online make specific tools available to all, with or without the appropriate licensed extension., These tools can be accessible as needed, or can be leveraged to increase efficiency by using the scalability of the Esri cloud, to run large datasets or generate tiles in a fraction of the time it would take with the Desktop application.
The additional capabilities of ArcGIS Pro offer even more options that were never available in ArcGIS Desktop (ArcMap). For example, to only mention a few, you can now perform 3D Empirical Bayesian Kriging to interpolate data and you can use supervised machine learning methods to create models and generate predictions. Some are additions to the extension you already know, and some are additions to the core functionalities.
The new ArcGIS Pro extensions, not available in ArcGIS Desktop (ArcMap) like Image Analyst, provide added capabilities to perform deep learning analysis on imagery and videos for the first time in the ArcGIS platform. There is also the new Business Analyst extension for specific commercial market analysis perspective, that offers capabilities like enriching your data and generating infographics to include in reports, without leaving the single interface.
ModelBuilder is now fully available in ArcGIS Pro. Performing analysis can get repetitive or involve complex workflows to remember. Using ModelBuilder is a must to create workflows with multiple tools and run them at once or in loops to automate your work with this fun drag and drop wizard.
The same automation possibilities exist for Python in ArcGIS Pro. Version 3 is now the norm compared to version 2 used in ArcGIS Desktop (ArcMap) and there is a new tool in ArcGIS Pro that can help you identify issues in your scripts and offer correction options, when you will want to migrate them.
That’s all I will reveal this month but look for my 2 other blog posts this summer and I will reveal my other 2 top reasons why you should start using ArcGIS Pro today.