Last week in July, we again sent our representatives to the ESRI International Users Conference held in San Diego, USA. The conference is an annual, important meeting of Geographic Information Systems users. To get started, let us go through some statistical information. This year, more than 13 thousand participants from 130 countries met in San Diego and the ESRI Company has prepared for its users:

• traditional opening ceremony of the conference
• hundreds of lectures by end users
• 188 90-minute workshops that were continuously held in 58 lecture halls, which seated between 200 and 1000 participants
• Map Gallery – the poster exhibit (over 2000 print output presentations from around the world)
• chance to talk to ESRI expert staff (Doctor’s Office)
• many working meetings on all conference topicscompany exhibits – several hundred companies from around the world participated
• Thursday party, this time in African style
• Friday closing ceremony, the top ESRI people were present
• GIS store
• golf and tennis tournaments, five-kilometer run, event for children, many other activities

The whole week was so filled with all kind of activity that we were getting up shortly after seven and went to bed past midnight to experience as much as possible.

Events we were primarily interested in:

• naturally, the opening words of Jack Dangermond (the ESRI President) who explained this year’s conference slogan in his address word for word (GIS…Helping…Manage…Our…World) and, at the same time, he also described his vision of future development of geographic information systems, a vision that can be summed up under the term GeoWeb.
• well-prepared and well-timed live lectures on the coming 9.2 product upgrades. The projection of images on two extra-large screens (10 x 35 meters) was fascinating – (even the people sitting in the back rows were able to see…).
• whole line of new developments of which the following got a lot of our attention:
• overall stabilization of ArcGIS as a whole, incl. many practical demonstrations verified through experience
• practical experience with Geodatabase utilization
• stabilization of ArcGIS desktop (ArcWiev, ArcEditor, ArcInfo)
• dynamic development of server GIS represented by ArcGIS server, ArcSDE, and ArcIMS
• introduction of Image Server
• introduction of latest ArcExplorer version
• new, transparent division of all ESRI products

To sum up this year’s international conference, I would like to mention that it was an important meeting of users from around the world which confirmed the increasing interest in GIS issues. ESRI Company confirmed its role as the world’s No.1 geographic information systems developer and we became convinced that the investments flowing into developing our own technologies (GISel, T-Map Server, and Tango Server) follow the world trends.

San Diego Convention Center welcomes the participants of the 25th Conference	Jack Dangermond in his opening address	A look into the conference vestibule	Overview of the 25-year conference tradition	A look into the hall where posters were presented	A look into the hall where posters were presented – National Geographic Hall	Conference atmosphere

Conference atmosphere	Closing party	Jan Kamenicky – a T-MAPY representative	Milan novotny – a T-MAPY representative	The feel of the closing party	A music star – Dr. David Maguire (No.2 man in ESRI	Jack Dangermond – on last day of the conference