What's Up Wednesday (15-March-2023): FME and ArcGIS (and Python) Compatibility, A Fireside Chat, Amazing User Stories, and Meet New Safers. (2024)

Hello FME friends,

Well, last week's newsletter was a day late, so to make up for that, this week, we're a day early. I'm off on a few days' vacation is why.

So enjoy this post, and I'll see you next week.

FME and ArcGIS Compatibility Parameters

As the introduction to that article notes, FME supports a variety of licensed, installed versions of Esri ArcMap and Esri ArcGIS Pro applications. So, how do you set up FME for your required Esri product? And what happens if your system has both Esri ArcMap and Esri ArcGIS Pro installed and licensed?

Well, to ensure workspace compatibility with your required Esri product, you use the Esri ArcGIS Compatibility parameter:

What "compatibility" means is that FME will try and find the Esri libraries it needs for your chosen platform, and use those in any translation.

Obviously, ArcMap means you want compatibility with ArcMap, and ArcGIS Pro means you want compatibility with ArcGIS Pro.

The Auto option causes FME to look for ArcMap libraries first, then - if it can't find them - ArcGIS Pro. So that's the setting to be careful of if you had both platforms installed.

The other wrinkle, of course, is that Python compatibility is also woven into how FME uses Esri products. For example, if you selected ArcMap compatibility, but an Esri ArcGIS Python interpreter, you'd get an error like this:

So these are important parameters for using FME with Esri products, and I recommend that you read the full article for more information.

A Fireside Chat

As it turns to spring in Canada, it is turning to winter in New Zealand, which must be why Abley has come up with a new FME Fireside Chat video.

This one is part 2 of their speakers' introductions to FME:

They cover how they wrote FMW files from scratch, how Workbench helped them, FMEpedia, and some tips from a long-time user.

Partner Events

Although we're not holding an official FME World Tour this year, a number of partners are still hosting their own events.

So please do check into these events and support our partners in their excellent work. I suspect some events will be broadcast online and so would be accessible even if you don't live in the region. There is always a lot of great information about the latest FME functionality and the latest user stories.

And speaking of user stories...

User Stories

I have a number of user stories this week that illustrate FME in various ways. I won't go into too much detail, but just give links so that you can investigate further for yourself.

Oxfam Trailwalker

Back in New Zealand, Oxfam Trailwalker is a fundraising event that involves teams competing in long-distance trail walks. Gary Nicholson from Locus frequently volunteers his organizational skills and makes use of FME to do so.

This year, Gary used a front-end of FME Server apps on an iPad, with a back-end of FME Server on Cloud, to enable checkpoint operators to log each team as they pass through the checkpoint.

Great work, Gary. We love to see FME used for good causes like this.

Military Veteran Cemeteries

In this project, by Safe partner, GeoDecisions, burial records of military veterans were matched against surveys of cemeteries to validate their data and to give spatial locations to graves.

It sounds like an interesting project in the field - land survey, GPS, photographs - and back at the office, FME was used to translate and process data into an NCA geodatabase model.

Environmental Surveys Management

This story is a very long read, but absolutely fascinating and a very important project. It was posted on LinkedIn by Sylwia Nikel-Shepherd.

Major infrastructure and engineering projects usually have an environmental survey taken, before starting, to ensure that all environmental risks and impacts are known in advance.

This article talks about a large-scale project - the HS2 rail line in the UK - and discusses how such a large project provides opportunities to innovate and automate handling of the survey data.

The project architecture shows a mix of Esri and FME functionality:

FME was used to do post-processing of data, quality assurance, and transfer of data to the format required by HS2.

So, this is quite a long article, but I think it's a wonderful example of a large-scale project, with complex requirements, and how FME can fit into the architecture to improve efficiency.

Meet New Safers

Safe has been on a bit of a hiring streak recently, so I wanted to introduce a few of my new colleagues whom I've already found and connected with on LinkedIn.

First up, Edgar Baculi, who has joined us as a technical support specialist on the Desktop team and is certainly feeling happy about his role.

Trevor Sierens is a new account manager at Safe and has the distinction of being our third remote team member in the province of Manitoba along with myself and Dean Hintz. Yay, #TeamManitoba

Kate Brillinger is the new FME Server support team lead and works remotely from Ontario.

FME Community members, please join me in welcoming these folks to Safe, and I'm sure they'd appreciate a follow on LinkedIn. They have public-facing roles, so I am sure you will interact with them all at some point anyway.

If you would like to join them, Safe often has career openings available. Right now, I see roles in software development for Server, a C++ developer for the FME engine, technical support for FME Server, marketing, admin assistant, and account managers.

Extra News

• Don't forget that the FME user conference - the Peak of Data Integration - takes place in Germany in September. The Super Early Bird conference passes are sold out, but Early Bird passes are still available.
• Additionally... the call for presentations at the event is still open. So if you have a great FME story - and I know that you do - there's still time to tell us all about it.
• Also don't forget that my colleague Dmitri is appearing in a webinar with Picterra on March 28th. A co-presenter is Lucio Colaiacomo, whom I hear has presented at FME World Tours in the past, so presumably knows a bunch about FME.
• Safe partner, con terra, is holding a webinar on FME for XPlan and XPlanGML. Apparently, this is a common specification for planning submissions in Germany, so this will be a very important capability for German users.
• The Red Geographics Transformer Friday post last week was about the DateTimeStamper transformer. I'll just mention that if you look in the latest FME:23 beta build, you might see a little update to that transformer, along with some other useful datetime updates!
• Speaking of betas, I believe the current one is the last we'll post until FME:23 is released, or very close to releasing anyway. So if Bob the Twitter feed isn't posting much, that's why.
• FME in a film quote, you say?
• ❤️