We strive to bring you the best of what the geospatial community has to offer. Here's a quick list of resources that we just can't live without. This list is by no means all inclusive—if you have tools or resources you really like, let us know and we'll see if we can include it here.
What we're saying
We blog about stuff. More specifically, we like to share insights, projects, tools, and best practices with the geospatial community.
Occasionally we interview our colleagues and peers about their unique and impactful work, and the intersection of geospatial concepts and techniques within that work. Check out the Utah Geospatial Podcast , opens in a new tab or listen to the latest episode below.
We also have a quarterly newsletter , opens in a new tab that you can subscribe to where we highlight our best content from the last three months.
What others are saying
There are many other great places to learn about GIS and to get help. Here are a few of our favorites:
Slack
Slack is our distributed communication platform of choice. The Spatial Community workspace is a thriving GIS community where we join with some helpful Esri employees, other public servants from across the country, and all other types of friends interested in GIS. This is a great place to ask realtime questions and spark a conversation with other GIS professionals. Join #arcgis-desktop and #arcgis-web and say hi to @steveoh, @Jake Adams, and @stdavis from UGRC.
X
X is our real time communication platform. We tweet as @MapUtah about new blog posts, porter issues , opens in a new tab , issues with services, and other GIS info. If you want to know what is going on before anyone else, follow us on X.
Esri Forums
The Esri forums are a great place to find multiple people to help you with any issues or questions you may be having. We tend to lean toward the real time communication platforms, but the forums are a great place to ask questions and search for how someone else may have solved a problem.
Esri Ideas
The mechanism to make changes to Esri products is through the ideas website. Here you can propose, comment, and vote on ideas that you think would improve their products. Below are a few ideas we have suggested and would love your comment and support with.
- Keeping consistent layer ids when publishing , opens in a new tab .
- Allow marking arcgis server services as deprecated , opens in a new tab .
- Use deprecation flag throughout the Esri platform , opens in a new tab .
- Improve attribute rule debugging , opens in a new tab .
Stack Exchange (GIS)
The GIS Stack Exchange is a great network of GIS professionals to ask questions and get answers in a consistent manner. This is an especially great place to ask questions about open source projects or other non-Esri GIS products.
Where can I learn more
Esri Training
Esri has many online courses that are included in the annual software maintenance cost. They also have several basic free courses that are a good introduction to GIS, ArcGIS Online, and ArcGIS Pro.
Free Esri Courses
Introduction to GIS
- GIS Basics , opens in a new tab
- Getting Started with ArcGIS Pro , opens in a new tab (Introduction to ArcGIS Pro)
- Cartography MOOC , opens in a new tab (This is a great introduction to cartographic design principles and applications.)
- ArcGIS Online Fundamentals , opens in a new tab (This includes short introductory videos, one introductory course, and several advanced courses that require an active maintenance agreement.)
ArcGIS Online Basics and Essentials
- Esri's getting started page
- Understanding credits , opens in a new tab , which are how you pay for storage and analysis in ArcGIS Online
- ArcGIS Online user account control: types, roles, and privileges , opens in a new tab
- ArcGIS Online pricing , opens in a new tab for user types and credits (purchased in blocks of 1,000)
A Note on Figuring out ArcGIS Online Credits
(This is a quick summary of how UGRC understands ArcGIS Online credit accounting. For the official Esri position, check out Esri's Understand credits , opens in a new tab page.)
Esri gives credit costs per month and billing is calculated each hour. For example, a 10 MB hosted feature service that was hosted for one month would use 2.4 credits. That same dataset hosted for an hour would be 2.4 / 30 / 24 = 0.00333 credits and hosted for one year would be 28.8 credits.
Tile layers (and other non-feature storage categories) are currently significantly cheaper (1/200th) than hosted feature layers—1.2 credits per 1 GB vs 2.4 credits per 10 MB.
All your credits sit in a common pool regardless of where they come from. You’ll get a certain number of credits from different sources—various AGOL subscription levels, Business Analyst, or purchasing them outright. Some of these have different expiration dates, and right now there’s no good way in AGOL to tell how many will expire when. Good accounting is your only tool.