Collector for ArcGIS v10.3 is out and it's a big deal!!

Version 10.3 of Collector for ArcGIS is available inside of Google Play right now and this is a big update! It will be coming soon in the iTunes App Store so that you can use it on iPhone and iPad devices, but we just couldn’t wait any longer to share it with our Android community!

What’s hot in 10.3…

Related Data in your forms – now you can create/update information that is modeled using relationship classes inside of your geodatabase. This unlocks new capabilities such as asset inspections where one or more inspection forms are related to an asset or simply using a relationship to provide a more advanced survey that includes optional “sub-forms”. Note that if you use archiving with ArcGIS Server feature layers specifically, please look for a patch coming for Server to support relationship classes.

Editing versioned feature services – leveraging your investment in ArcGIS for Server, you can publish feature services that are managed using a versioned transaction model and edit features offline using Collector. What’s great about this is that you can use the versioning model to manage the QA/QC of field edits before merging them into production systems. Note that this requires you upgrade ArcGIS for Server to 10.3.

Editing Permissions – when you capture or update data in Collector you are using feature layers. Feature layers support advanced editing permissions defined through the service that they are hosted within (either ArcGIS Online Hosted Feature Layers or ArcGIS for Server Feature Layers). Collector now fully honors those permissions so that you can model desired behavior such as restricting field users to editing form content and not location or preventing them from deleting features.

Hosted Tiled Web Layers – until now you could either take Esri basemap layers offline, cook your own tile packages and side-load them to your mobile device or publish ArcGIS Server Tiled Map Service Layers and use them as your basemap. Well now you can also use tiled web layers hosted within your ArcGIS Online subscription.

What’s Coming Next…

Without giving it all away, there are some big things in the works this year! A couple of the big ones – first we are working hard to bring Collector to Windows and Windows Phone devices right now and it will include all of the great capabilities of the 10.3 release! Second – we are improving the capabilities within the map and how it is packaged for use in the field (more advanced symbology, pre-packaging maps for offline use, and more).

Watch the sneak peek on the Collector doc page and let us know what you want to see as well! We’ll update this announcement when Collector is available inside of iTunes as well.