Esri News Roundup, from dymaptic

AI-generated, human-reviewed. Scout, our AI content assistant, drafts each edition from material the dymaptic team gathers: case studies, software news, and industry insights from Esri's blog and community, social media, Esri emails, and notes from our Esri Technical Advisor. We review before sending, but verify anything critical against the linked sources.

Recent Esri releases lean toward keeping existing maps and apps healthy and reaching ArcGIS from tools teams already use, from a large set of content retiring at the end of the year to Python analysis inside Excel and new developer APIs for ArcGIS Hub.

Quick Summary

• Ready to use: Esri is retiring more than 1,000 layers, maps, apps, and services after December 31, 2026, including a group of legacy demographic map layers, so any ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise organization that uses Esri content should check its maps for retiring items before that date.
• Ready to use: The September 2026 update to the ArcGIS Geocoding service adds more rooftop-level address points in seven countries and a matchIDFormat parameter that shortens match IDs, which helps developers who run and store large batch geocoding jobs.
• Worth a pilot: Pairing ArcGIS for Excel with Microsoft's Python in Excel lets analysts map, enrich, and cluster location data inside one spreadsheet, and it suits teams that already do most of their analysis in Excel.
• Worth a pilot: ArcGIS Hub has a new developer documentation site for its Search, Events, Discussions, and Feeds APIs, plus a beta DCAT-US 3.0 catalog feed for sharing open data with data.gov, which suits government open data teams and developers building on public data.
• Worth watching: The ArcGIS Online Early Access Community lets organizations test upcoming ArcGIS Online features about two weeks before each update, and ArcGIS Enterprise 12.2, which Esri describes as soon to release, will bring the AI services for analyzing images, analyzing text, and translation to Enterprise.

Ready to Use

December 31, 2026 content retirements. Esri has announced the retirement of select legacy content in December 2026. The December 2026 retirement list names more than 1,000 layers, maps, apps, and services that will no longer be available to use after December 31, 2026. Every item on the list has been in mature support for at least one year, many of them for more than two, and many name a recommended replacement in their item descriptions.

A separate Esri post covers a group of legacy demographic map layers retiring on the same date. These layers were previously offered as premium demographic content and moved to mature support in November 2025. Once their supporting services are turned off, the layers stop appearing in web maps, and the apps, dashboards, and analyses that reference them may show incomplete content or errors. For current demographic data, Esri points to ArcGIS Business Analyst Web App, the ArcGIS GeoEnrichment service, and data files from the Esri Store.

Two details make this more than a calendar reminder. Copying a web map or app does not copy the data behind it, so a copy still points at the retiring service and stops working along with the original. ArcGIS Enterprise portals are affected too. In Enterprise 12.2 or earlier, retiring items may still show up in portal searches, but once they retire in ArcGIS Online, the content behind them is inaccessible and the item is broken.

Finding the affected maps is the real work, and Esri has made it more manageable than it sounds. Every Esri item carries a life cycle category (Beta, General Availability, Mature Support, or Retiring), and retiring items also show a Retirement Notice in their description. For organizations with a large content library, ArcGIS API for Python 2.4.4 helps from the other direction. Its dependency analysis now supports reverse-dependency discovery, which means you can start with a single feature layer and find every map or app that uses it. That turns an audit of hundreds of items into a script you can run, fix against, and run again. A practical order is to run that check first, swap in Esri's recommended replacements where they exist, and keep December for testing the maps and dashboards your users open most.

ArcGIS Geocoding service, September 2026 update. Esri's September 2026 update to the ArcGIS Geocoding service adds point address records in seven countries, so more results land on the building itself rather than on an estimated spot along the street. Bulgaria's count doubled, and Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Romania grew by between 0.2 and 6.6 percent.

Developers get two practical changes. A new matchIDFormat parameter for findAddressCandidates and geocodeAddresses requests returns a shorter form of the matchID output field, which Esri says reduces file size, and batch jobs that store every result are where that saving adds up. The service description also now includes a parameters section that lists the REST parameters the service supports, so you can check what a request accepts without leaving the service. Match Narrative support now covers 13 more countries, for 53 in total.

If your apps filter results by country or region, two administrative changes need a look. Nauru's official name is now Naoero and its country code has changed from NRU to NRO, and South Korea's Jeollanam-do and Gwangju regions have merged into a single region named Jeonnam-Gwangju. A hard-coded country code or region list is the kind of thing that fails without an error message, so update those lookups before your next batch run.

Worth a Pilot

Python in Excel with ArcGIS for Excel. Esri's introduction to Python in Excel with ArcGIS for Excel combines two tools many organizations already have. ArcGIS for Excel is a Microsoft 365 add-in that puts an interactive ArcGIS map inside a spreadsheet, and Python in Excel is a Microsoft feature that lets you write Python directly in a cell and treat a range of cells as a table Python can sort, group, and analyze. In Esri's example, 30 survey sites are mapped, enriched with the 2026 population within 10 miles of each site using the ENRICHBYPOINT function, and then sorted into high, medium, and low priority with a K-means clustering model, which groups records that have similar values. Once population is part of the picture, the high-priority list changes from two sites to three, and filtering the sheet updates the map at the same time.

The prerequisite to check first is which Python you get. Esri's own Python libraries, including the ArcGIS API for Python, are not currently supported in Python in Excel, because Microsoft runs it in its cloud with a fixed set of Anaconda libraries. The ArcGIS work happens through the add-in's functions, and the Python side uses standard data science libraries. Esri attached the sample dataset and the clustering code to the post, so an Excel-first analyst can try the whole pattern on test data before it touches a team process.

ArcGIS Hub for developers and open data publishers. Esri has launched a developer documentation site for ArcGIS Hub that brings four Hub APIs into one place: Search, Events, Discussions, and Feeds. In a Developer's Lounge interview, Andrew Turner, the Esri CTO who leads the Hub team, explains that each Hub site has its own API endpoint and that more than 28,000 public Hub sites are available for developers to build on. Hub.py and Hub.js libraries are listed as coming soon, and the team plans to add documentation for its Newsletter API, Telemetry API, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) services. MCP is a standard way for AI assistants to connect to outside tools and data.

Hub catalog feeds also now support DCAT-US 3.0 (beta). DCAT is a standard vocabulary for describing data catalogs, and DCAT-US 3.0 is the United States profile that data.gov requires. You can preview a site's feed by adding /api/feed/dcat-us/3.0 to its Hub site URL, and Esri has published a crosswalk that shows how ArcGIS metadata fields map into the new format. Because the feed is generated from item metadata, the quality of your descriptions and tags decides how well a dataset shows up in other catalogs. Government teams already federating open data with data.gov can use the beta period to test the feed against their own metadata and send feedback through Esri's survey, while developers building on public data will find the Search API the natural starting point until the client libraries arrive.

Worth Watching

The next ArcGIS Online update and ArcGIS Enterprise 12.2. ArcGIS Online is updated three times a year, and the ArcGIS Online Early Access Community opens about two weeks before each update with a testing environment where members can try upcoming features against their own workflows. Joining is free for organizations with an ArcGIS Online subscription. Other members may be able to see data added to the shared test organization, so sample or public data is the better choice there.

ArcGIS Enterprise 12.2 is the other release to prepare for. Esri's Python API release post describes it as soon to release and says the AI services for analyzing images, analyzing text, and translation, now generally available in ArcGIS Online, will be offered in 12.2 as well. Once 12.2 is out, Enterprise teams can try those services on their own data and decide which workflows they fit. Teams planning a move can start with Esri's ArcGIS Enterprise Migration Fundamentals, which walks through common migration workflows, from moving to new infrastructure to switching between Windows, Linux, and Kubernetes deployments, along with the questions that decide which approach fits.

New in the Developer SDKs

• Calcite Design System 5.2. Calcite 5.2 adds inline editing with confirm and cancel controls to Input, Input Number, and Input Text, an optional sticky header for Table, and support for the browser's native color-scheme setting for light and dark modes. Esri notes that inline editing on Input components deprecates the Inline Editable component, which will be removed in a future breaking-change release, and that Calcite 6, with breaking changes, is planned for early 2027.
• ArcGIS API for Python 2.4.4. Version 2.4.4, released September 21, adds arcgis_geometry, a geometry package built on Rust for faster and more stable geometry operations. It also adds replica and sync support for knowledge graphs, offline cloning that now handles about 98 percent of item types, and administration tools for ArcGIS Video Server.
• ArcGIS Maps SDKs for Native Apps 300.1. Version 300.1, released August 5, adds Gaussian splat layers, which build highly realistic 3D views of structures and vegetation from millions of soft, ellipsoid-shaped elements, for desktop apps built with the .NET and Qt SDKs; Android and iOS support is planned. Local scenes gain the Places and Labels layer, 3D Tiles, and point cloud layers, and vector tile layers now support identify.
• ArcGIS Maps SDK 2.4 for Unreal Engine and Unity. Also released August 5, both versions add Gaussian splat layers for desktop platforms, data-driven styling for point clouds, billboarded marker symbols for 3D point layers that turn to face the camera, and improved 3D Tiles support. Esri has separate posts for Unreal Engine and Unity.

What This Issue Does Not Cover

This roundup is a curated selection, not a complete list of every Esri and industry release. If something important isn't here, it may simply not have made the cut this edition.

About Dymaptic

Dymaptic is an Esri Gold Partner building geospatial AI tools that extend the ArcGIS platform with grounded, trustworthy AI capabilities. From custom software to AI agents that work alongside GIS analysts, dymaptic helps public sector teams and mission-driven organizations turn spatial data into clear, defensible answers.

Generated using Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 on November 5, 2026; Reviewed by E.Brooks