ESRI Business Analyst Desktop 9.3.1 Enhancements

Faster Analysis: Data and map caching revisions have resulted in significantly faster analysis for most general tasks. Users should expect performance improvements of 30-50% on such processes such as grid generation, dynamic ring analysis, report generation, and significant improvements to distance decay reports.

Improved Wizard Help: Significant effort was dedicated to making the product easier to use. We examined every single dialog and asked the questions: Is this dialog clear? Does the help text make sense? What does this option do and which one should I pick? This expansive review resulted in better descriptive tips, wizard images more representative of the tool output, and modified dialogs. The cleaner wizard dialogs will help you navigate through the software with greater ease, even for the most sophisticated features.

New, easy way to associate logos with stores: with Business Analyst Desktop 9.3.1 you can now easily associate a logo with a store layer when you setup your stores:

Comprehensive Data Package enables immediate, precise analysis of any U.S. trade area. ESRI data provides an unprecedented level of accuracy; for example, ESRI data identified the beginning of the bursting housing bubble and emergence of the damaging effect of the sub-prime mortgages - a full two years before the market actually collapsed.

Data includes:

• ESRI's 2009/2014 Updated Demographics—More than 1,500 variables developed with proven methodologies accurately capture the demographic aspect of any area.
• Tapestry Segmentation adds information about lifestyles, lifestages, spending patterns, product and media preferences for every U.S. residential neighborhood.
• Business Data from infoUSA provides statistics for more than 12 million businesses by SIC/NAICS industry classifications.
• Major Shopping Centers data from Directory of Major Malls includes information for more than 4,200 major U.S. centers of 225,000+
• Street Data from Tele Atlas is superior, nationwide street and geocoding data that provides routing attributes and attractive map display as a single street database source.
• Imagery—View current and potential properties from another perspective with superior imagery from GlobeXplorer.

For more information on ESRI's data, methodologies and the 2009/2014 demographic updates visit our data section.

Significantly Improved Maps and Map Design: there are a number of improvements to the maps in Business Analyst Desktop 9.3.1:

1. The standard map document ("MXD") for Business Analyst Desktop has undergone a extensive redesign, not only to make it much more appealing, but also to give it much higher performance. Map draw times are up to 4 times faster than the previous release of Business Analyst Desktop.
2. Business Analyst Desktop makes it even easier to access online map collections from ArcGIS Online. These map collections include street maps, imagery, topographic maps and more.
3. Business Analyst Desktop now provides standard access to the Microsoft Virtual Earth map collection.

New Local Search Function: with Business Analyst Desktop 9.3.1, Bing ™ Search is now embedded in the toolbar. With this toolbar it is now easy to search for types of businesses in the current map (e.g. "Pizza") or in a particular area (e.g. "Pizza in Chicago") or a particular business (e.g. "Joe's Pizza"). This new function is designed to complement the InfoUSA Business Data already provided in Business Analyst Desktop, providing live internet data that can be easily layered onto your maps.

Map Series Reports: it now possible to include up to five fields of attribute information in the header of each report. This allows users to show the critical information for each map in a map series report:

Custom Report Improvements: The custom report editor has been extensively overhauled and is now more much intuitive. With particular attention to context sensitive menus and drag-and-drop functionality the user experience is now very similar to customizing a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel or a table in Microsoft Word.

See demos of the new enhancements to ESRI Business Analyst 9.3.1:

• Bing business search and save business queries
• Custom report enhancements
• Faster analysis, store logo enhancements, and refreshed wizards
• Map Series Report enhancements
• Maps, MXD, Toolbar enhancements, 2009 Data