Authoring, Publishing and Synchronising with ArcPad 8

With the introduction of ArcPad 8, comes the ability to author, publish and remotely synchronise with the map service on your mobile devices.To give you a quick quide on how to accomplish these tasks, we've provided a series of short instructional videos to guide you through the process.
As with all activities associated with ArcPad - full instruction on how to achieve these tasks is available via the ArcPad User and Reference guides.

The Author Project for ArcGIS Server tool in ArcMap guides the user through a wizard with similar dialogs as in the Get Data for ArcPad wizard. The Author Project for ArcGIS Server tool is enabled when you have a saved ArcMap .MXD open. To create data, you need to Publish Data to ArcGIS Server.

Select the Author Project for ArcGIS Server from the ArcPad Data Manager Toolbar and the welcome page appears. By clicking 'Next', the Select Data screen appears. All of the layers in the .MXD, including the Relationship classes associated with geodatabases are displayed together with the layer name.
On the action tab you have an option of setting the action on an individual layer or you can choose to set the same settings for all the layers.
Note: Only the layers that have the map’s spatial reference will be available for checkout.

Follow the logical sequence of instruction in the wizard to Author your map publication. At the end of the process, an .apo file is created alongside your ArcMap .mxd document. You use the mxd and apo together to create an ArcPad publication when publishing the ArcPad project to ArcGIS Server.
At this stage, no data has been created on the server. You must complete the Publish Data to ArcGIS Server process to create a Map Service.

Publishing Data to ArcGIS Server

An ArcPad Project is published in a similar manner to any other ArcGIS Server Map Service in ArcCatalog. If you have not already, you must first copy the .mxd together with the associated .apo files to place that is accessable by the ArcGIS Server. It is recommended that you create the folder c:\MXD to store your mxd's. The “Add New Service” option on the right click context menu of the ArcGIS Server (in ArcCatalog) provides you with the option to create an ArcPad enabled Map Service.

Follow the steps of publication as you would for any other Map Service. On the add GIS Service page of the wizard, select “ArcPad’. If your ArcGIS Server environment uses a reverse proxy server, you should add the server's url on the GIS Service page of the wizard.

When you ‘Finish’ the wizard, an ArcPad enabled Map Service is created, which you can immediately preview in ArcCatalog or ArcMap as you would any other Map Service. Also created on the server are the ArcPad files for deployment.

After an ArcPad project is published to the ArcGIS Server successfully, a zip file and a .cab file are also created on the Server. If you wish to disseminate your data to a large group of field users, you can download the cab via your desktop web browser and email or distribute as required. The zip and cab files are stored on the ArcGIS Server in the folder :\\ [Your GIS server name]\arcgisserver\arcpadpublications\DataForArcPad
Review the video for further instruction on Publishing ArcGIS Map Services.

Synchronising Data from ArcGIS Server

To download published data to your mobile device, open the ‘Add Data from Server’ dialog in ArcPad.
Long time ArcPad users should recognize this dialog, in previous versions of ArcPad it was called the ‘Add Internet Server’ dialog and was used to add IMS data to your map.

The dialog still allows you to add an IMS Service, but it also allows you to browse for ArcGIS Server ArcPad Services. Enter the URL of your ArcGIS Server (which contains published ArcPad data), and choose the data from the list. That data will be downloaded to your mobile device, unpacked and added to your map.

Edit your data in the same way you would any other data. To synchronize your edits with the enterprise geodatabase, simply create a connection to your network (via WIFI, phone, or USB connection to your pc and network) and choose the ‘Synchronize Data with ArcGIS Server’ menu item in ArcPad.

The ArcPad sync window displays messages that describe the synchronization process.
The Video here will further illustrate and demonstrate the process.