What's new in ArcGIS Enterprise 12.1
ArcGIS Enterprise 12.1 introduces new features for data management and administration, updates across applications, and enhanced functionality throughout the product. This page highlights some of the new features available and includes links to additional information for specific components and functionality.
Additional supporting resources for this version:
Caution:
Before upgrading ArcGIS Enterprise, review the considerations for upgrades.
Product highlights
For additional details about what's new in all ArcGIS Enterprise components, APIs, server roles, and apps, see the sections and links below.
ArcGIS Data Pipelines is a no-code, visual data engineering capability that makes it easy to prepare and integrate data for mapping and analysis workflows.
ArcGIS Velocity is the real-time processing and analysis capability of ArcGIS Enterprise. It allows you to import, visualize, analyze, store, and use data from Internet of Things (IoT) sensors.
ArcGIS Pipeline Referencing, ArcGIS Data Reviewer, and ArcGIS Roads and Highways are now supported on Linux operating systems.
Observability enhancements include using the metrics API to capture information about your system and the machines on which your ArcGIS Enterprise components are running. See Observability in ArcGIS Enterprise and Understand the metrics API for details.
Enable response caching from the organization to increase scalability and performance of feature layers.
If you have the privilege to create notebooks, you can Use notebook secrets programmatically across your notebooks, for both interactive and scheduled workflows, without exposing hardcoded secret values.
Organization administration
The following are updates for administering an organization:
Manage which members of your organization can take an ArcGIS Pro license offline through a dedicated privilege.
Transfer a member's user type, role, content, groups, add-on licenses, settings, and member categories to another existing member.
Use interactive charts, tables, and lists on the Dashboard tab to access detailed information about your organization's content, members, and groups.
Use the Reports tab to create and schedule new reports and manage existing ones.
Data management
The following are updates for creating and managing data:
Use a hosted feature layer or table to add rows to or update rows in another hosted feature layer or table.
When exporting data from a hosted feature layer, hosted feature layer view, or hosted table to a .csv or Excel file, set the display name or the field name as the header for the fields in the exported file.
Add geospatial PDFs as items and designate them for use in ArcGIS Field Maps.
The Replace layer option now supports replacing 3D layers published from a 3D tiles package (
.3TZ) and 3D layers that reference i3sRest or 3D tiles dataset content.From the item page of a hosted feature layer, allow members of your organization with access to the layer to append data and add and manage shared templates.
From the item page of a geodata service, you can start and stop the service, manage supported capabilities, and enable or disable WCS.
From the item page of a feature layer that participates in a utility network, you can manage which utility network operations are allowed.
View collaboration details on the Overview tab of the group page if the group is linked to a distributed collaboration.
When publishing a feature layer that references a custom data provider, choose the federated server site to which you want to publish the layer as a service.
The following are updates for ArcGIS Data Store:
If you deployed the object store in single-instance mode, you can now change it to cluster mode by adding at least two machines to it using the
configuredatastoreutility and specifying the--modeoption set tocluster. You must have a default backup location configured for the object store before you add machines to it, and the new machines must have access to this location.The
describedatastoreutility now returns properties for deployments that use a cloud service for the object store.The
datastoremetricsutility was added to enable the collection of metrics for the relational store.
Mapping and visualization
The following are updates for mapping and visualization:
Split and merge features when updating feature geometry in Map Viewer. Additionally, use new selection tools to choose between replacing, adding to, or removing a selected feature.
Create and edit true curves using drawing tools in Map Viewer, and switch between drawing tools when creating and editing features.
Field value formatting has been updated to better align with internationalization standards, which offers improved locale support for date and number fields and introduces new formatting options. Show properties such as time zone in pop-ups when authoring maps intended for multiple locales.
When configuring labels, you can now adjust how they are prioritized when they conflict with one another by reordering the label classes in the Label features pane. You can also disable deconfliction on a label class, allowing labels to be drawn if they conflict with others.
When styling vector line and vector polygon fill symbols that have the offset effect property, you can now configure the offset distance, join method, and drawing performance.
When styling lines and polygons that support gradient symbology, you can now customize the gradient stroke and gradient fill.
When working with Types (unique symbols) data, you can select all values in the Other category and move these values into a new or existing group.
When styling layers in Map Viewer, animate any vector symbol, including custom symbols and individual components of a symbol.
Printing in Map Viewer now supports a dynamic legend, showing only the legend for features visible in the current map extent in the printed layout. You can also now choose your preferred scale bar unit, allowing you to include a reference scale that is more relevant to the map scale.
Enable pop-ups on hosted tile layers without a backing feature layer by referencing a feature layer with relevant attributes.
The What's here? functionality now supports custom locators in addition to the ArcGIS World Geocoding Service if you have enabled them to allow reverse geocoding.
Use shared (group and preset) templates created in ArcGIS Pro when working with editing templates in Map Viewer. Shared templates can be configured for both hosted and ArcGIS Server feature layers.
Enable time-based layer visibility to display a layer only for a specific time period.
When working with attachments, view related photos and files directly in the attribute table and maximize them for full-page viewing.
Choose iFrame when embedding maps using ready-to-use HTML code.
Create a custom link to a map and configure how it will appear when opened using the link.
Append the mapOnly=true URL parameter to share a link that opens Map Viewer with toolbars hidden.
When configuring pop-ups, filter which attachments are displayed in the pop-up based on selected keywords and attachment type.
Field value formatting when configuring cluster fields and configuring bin fields has been updated to better align with internationalization standards, which offers improved locale support for date and number fields and introduces new formatting options.
Add and edit waypoints to dynamically adjust a route when getting directions and creating route layers.
Calendar heat charts are now available to visualize patterns in temporal data by aggregating incidents into a calendar grid.
Bar charts have two new parameters: Treat null as category and Enable temporal binning. When enabled, Treat null as category will add a bar summarizing null values from the Category field to the chart. Enable temporal binning is available when a date field is chosen for the Category variable and is used to create bins of time intervals along the x-axis of the chart.
Scatterplots now include a Tooltip display field parameter, which is used to choose a number field to display in the tooltip for a point without being used as a variable to create the chart.
The oriented imagery viewer is updated with enhanced navigation, new search workflows, and improved performance across all imagery exploration tasks:
The oriented imagery viewer widget opens in the Map Viewer center panel, improving accessibility and resolving previous size‑constraint issues, resulting in a more consistent and optimized viewing experience.
The oriented imagery viewer interface has been redesigned to deliver a more streamlined and intuitive user experience.
Key tools with overlapping or related functionality are now grouped under consolidated parent toggles, reducing visual clutter and providing a cleaner, more organized layout.
A new Search tools group has been introduced to the widget, providing three options for accessing imagery from an oriented imagery layer:
Explore images—Performs a best‑image search based on the user‑selected map location.
Explore images 3D—Extends the explore images workflow by incorporating height‑based filtering using the features Z‑values.
Display images—Allows users to select an oriented imagery feature directly on the map or scene to view its associated image.
Image caching is now enabled for the oriented imagery viewer widget during directional and sequential navigation, improving overall viewer performance and reducing image load times.
The oriented imagery viewer widget now supports Time‑Info filtering when querying for images, enabling users to retrieve imagery based on temporal constraints for more precise and context‑aware results.
The oriented imagery viewer component and widget now support visualizing tiled image formats (
COGandMRF) for 360 imagery, which load faster than traditionalJPGimages, resulting in improved overall performance.
3D GIS
The following are updates for 3D GIS:
Visualize direction in imagery layers using flow and elevation.
3D models with georeferencing information such as IFCv4 files, are now placed automatically in the scene when uploaded.
Run custom geoprocessing tools directly within Scene Viewer to enable more flexible, scenario-specific analysis workflows.
Scene Viewer now supports Gaussian splat layers, which use dense visual data to create smooth and photo-like scenes. This 3D layer type is well suited for visualizing rich detail across infrastructure, vegetation, and urban environments.
Use ArcGIS Arcade expressions for your layer visualizations.
Browse and add layers from favorite ArcGIS Hub catalogs.
Close all messages that might appear when loading a scene to focus on your task.
Analysis
The following new tools and enhancements are available for analysis tools:
The Geomorphon Landforms raster analysis tool calculates the geomorphon pattern of each cell of an input surface raster and classifies them into common landform types.
The Summarize Categorical Raster raster analysis tool generates a table containing the pixel count for each category in each slice of an input multidimensional categorical raster.
The Enrich Layer tool now includes a Travel direction parameter when a travel mode is used to generate enrichment areas. Choosing the travel direction is important when generating travel areas because of road network restrictions like one-way streets.
The following new raster functions are now available:
The Label Bad Bands raster function enables you to specify a set of bands using ranges or lists to be labeled as bad.
The Subset Bands raster function enables you to extract a subset of bands using ranges or lists.
The following enhancements are now available for environment settings:
The processing extent environment setting has been split into two separate settings: Analysis processing extent applies to feature analysis tools and Raster analysis processing extent applies to raster analysis tools and raster functions. You can turn off Use a different processing extent for raster analysis to apply the Analysis processing extent setting to all analysis.
The default processing extent for raster analysis is now Display extent.
Plan Routes and Calculate Travel Cost now support the Processing extent environment setting.
Servers
Server extensions
Apps
There are new features and enhancements for the following apps in ArcGIS Enterprise:
APIs and SDK
See what's new for developers in ArcGIS Server administration, Portal administration, ArcGIS Services Directory, and the ArcGIS Portal Directory.
See the ArcGIS API for Python documentation.
See the ArcGIS Enterprise SDK documentation.
Cloud builders and templates
ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes
ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes is a cloud-native deployment option for ArcGIS Enterprise. It is available alongside Windows and Linux deployment options. It delivers ArcGIS Enterprise in a containerized architecture, running on either your organization's Kubernetes platform or your cloud provider's Kubernetes service.
See the ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes help to learn more.
Retirement and deprecation notices
Review each notice below and determine whether they impact your organization's workflows.
As of 12.1, help resources for the following languages have been retired from the ArcGIS Enterprise on Windows and Linux language packs:
- Arabic, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil)
ArcGIS Workforce, both the mobile and web applications, will be officially retired in ArcGIS Enterprise 12.2. Customers currently using ArcGIS Workforce or Workforce for ArcGIS must begin planning their transition to using the new Tasks capability in ArcGIS Field Maps to ensure continuity. Learn more in the ArcGIS Workforce deprecation notice.
ArcGIS GeoEvent Server is being deprecated with its final release planned for ArcGIS Enterprise 12.3. This deprecation is driven by the release of ArcGIS Velocity for ArcGIS Enterprise, which offers enhanced performance and a modern user experience. Customers currently using ArcGIS GeoEvent Server must begin planning their transition to ArcGIS Velocity. Learn more about the deprecation of ArcGIS GeoEvent Server.