Planning one’s agenda for the ESRI user conference is no small task… one needs to take loads of time and select sessions carefully, ensuring you don’t wind up having to be at 3 places at one time (luckily many popular sessions are repeated). And so, to help you out, here’s a few reminders about 10 sessions that I’m planning on hitting - maybe some of them will interest you as well.

1. The ArcGIS Server Geoportal extension (formerly the GIS Portal Toolkit) provides a fully supported, stable platform to build geospatial portals, spatial data infrastructures (SDIs), and metadata catalogs.
2. ArcGIS Online - ArcGIS Online provides maps and other content for your ArcGIS and there’s been many recent advances.. no doubt I won’t be the only person interested in hearing all about ArcGIS Online!
3. The Geo Mentor Program - Not a session, but definitely something that I’l be asking ESRI’s Charlie Fitzpatrick about… GIS users can help educators and youth see the world in new ways. Work with a teacher or youth club leader to help kids see, use, and do more geography in their activities!
4. ArcGIS Explorer (900) - We all love free stuff, so when ESRI rolls out a huge update to ArcGIS Exmplorer people are going to be interested! ArcGIS Explorer (Free app) offers an easy way to view, present, and share GIS data. It connects directly to a variety of ready-to-use ArcGIS Online basemaps and layers and enables users to connect to their own map services or add local data.
5. DigitalGlobe WorldView 2
6. With a planned launch date early this fall, WorldView 2 is DigitalGlobe’s next-gen earth imaging “bird”. The bird will boast, 16.4 km width imaging swath, 184 cm resolution at nadir, 1.1 day revisit at 1 m GSD or less.. wow! I Can’t wait to see and hear more about this.
7. GeoEye 1 - Launched earler this year, I’m excited to see what GeoEye is showing off in their booth and hearing about what they have planned for the future with GeoEye 2.
8. ArcPad 8 - I’m always a huge fan of mobile GIS and mobile solutions so you can expect me to be sniffing around the UC for updates from teh ARcPAd development team on the company’s mobile solutions.
9. The latest from LizardTech.. word on the street has it that LizarTech is announcing a new product this week… actually I’ll be hearing about it on Sunday.. stay tuned for more but it should be good!
10. Presentaions from ESRI’s Software leads… The Cloud… everyone seems to be buzzing about the Cloud and Cloud computing technologies - There’s a session on Tuesday AM by Scott Morehouse (ESRI director of software development) title Web GIS, taking advantage of the cloud — sounds like a great place to be at 8:30! Another hot topic is Imagery so, on Wednesday AM the session titled Imagery Then and Now, Detecting Change, presented by ESRI’s director of imagery (enterprise), Lawrie Jordan should be very informative. Finally, no ESRI agenda planner is complete unless you are planning on listening to Clint Brown , ESRI’s director of software products — so make sure you check out Clint’s session on Thursday morning titled Bringing Geographic Information to Life - Clint, make sure you don’t stay out too late Wednesday ;0)

    BONUS PICK… Plenary Session of interest… naturally, listening to Jack will be amazing (it always is a real treat), however, this year there’s also a special presenter and given the US NAtional Census will be taking place in 2010 its a very timely presentation. Timothy Trainor Chief, Geography Division, United States Census Bureau wil be on stage Monday afternoon… this should be very interesting! Timothy Trainor will discuss the enormity of the Census Bureau’s data collection process.

See more session info at http://www.esri.com/events/uc/agenda/sessions.html and remember to follow me on Twitter via @gletham