What's new in ArcGIS 10.3 for Server

Everyone hopefully saw the announcement last week that ArcGIS 10.3 is now available. In this occasion we want to drill down into what is new in the ArcGIS for Server product, which includes enhancements to the GIS Server, and licensing changes in its Portal for ArcGIS extension.

The GIS Server includes some key enhancements providing features that we have heard requests for over the past releases:

• ArcGIS Server Manager now includes a new dashboard for administrators to get usage metrics such as total requests, average response time etc on ArcGIS Server services. This will help you better understand how your services are being used.
• You can now configure your map services so the ID of your layers is preserved. This will make your own web applications resilient to changes in the order of layers in your map services.
• At 10.3, we now support OGC Web Features Service (version 2.0) and have enhanced our support for multi-dimensional data in wms services. Check this link for more details.
• Organizations serving large basemaps will benefit from significant performance improvements to consumption of cached tiles when using a new compact cache format. Even without use of the new cache format, secured cached map services will see big improvements to tile retrieval times

The full list of issues addressed is available online and the What’s new in ArcGIS 10.3 for Server help topic goes into detail on many of the new things in the GIS server. Please read the compatibility help topic for details as you plan to upgrade to the 10.3 release.

The Portal for ArcGIS extension is now included at no additional cost with both ArcGIS for Server Standard and ArcGIS for Server Advanced licenses. This was first announced during the User Conference and we are excited to make this available to all of our customers in order to provide a complete Web GIS with ArcGIS for Server. Here are some reasons why we think Portal for ArcGIS will be important to you:

The Portal provides an effective way to organize your ArcGIS Server services, maps and apps so everyone can find and use them quickly.

• It includes Web AppBuilder, which will allow you to easily build lightweight GIS Web apps from scratch. With Web AppBuilder you can leverage unique features of ArcGIS for Server such as Geoprocessing Tasks, High Quality Printing services and more.  Your configured Apps will run on pure HTML code and look great not just on your desktop, but also on your tablets and smartphones. Have a look at this short video for an intro to Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS.
• Portal for ArcGIS is bundled with a great collection of configurable Web Application Templates.  This means that you can more easily create focused and beautiful web apps and make your work look much better. You will find a variety of templates from configurable map viewers to map journals, crowdsourcing templates and more.
• Named user licenses for using Collector for ArcGIS , Explorer for ArcGIS, Esri Maps for Office  and Operations Dashboard for ArcGIS are also included with your Portal for ArcGIS extension.

If you are familiar already with Portal for ArcGIS, you will find a comprehensive list of new functionality in the  What’s new in Portal for ArcGIS 10.3  help topic, but among all the enhancements, we want to highlight the following:

• Support for SAML 2.0 authentication
• Management of group membership based on an enterprise identity store
• Custom roles to better control privileges of your users
• The new Activity Dashboard to better understand usage metrics in your portal.

Finally, we want to highlight the new location for everything related to ArcGIS 10.3 for Server: server.arcgis.com. From there you can navigate to documentation, product information and much more.

Happy Holidays!

The ArcGIS for Server Team