Over on Google+ (and also on Twitter), Brian Flood announced the impending availability of Arc2Earth Sync Beta to existing Arc2Earth users. This has been brewing for for a while and Brian says it best:
“What makes Sync really cool is the live edit synchronization and the ability to publish online to different formats. It’s a great way to provide integration between ArcGIS desktops/online and the other Cloud database providers like Google.”
So it gives users the ability to publish, edit and synchronize data they are storing in on-line, hosted environments using the editing tools of ArcMap. The initial beta will only support Google Fusion Tables but support for Google Earth Builder and – this caught my eye right away – CartoDB are scheduled for after the first of the year.
There are a lot of ArcGIS for Desktop users out there and exposing different hosted solutions using workflows and tools with which they are comfortable has the potential to do a lot for user choice and the ability to control one’s own data.
Here is a link to Brian’s screencast showing Arc2Earth Sync in action: https://arc2earth.viewscreencasts.com/fe762cac52664083ad5dfdfcd0f750c9