Virtual Earth Embedded in ArcGIS

The escellent Arc2Earth applicaiton from has always had the ability to display map tiles from Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask.com [1] as a custom layer in your map. What is new in this beta release is the ability to directly embed the API from Microsoft and Google into ArcMap. You can drape your own data over the existing globes and then use this as an element on your Page Layout for exporting to either paper or digital copies. The process of draping your current map over the globes happens automatically and on a background thread, so its really intuitive to work with and doesn’t stall the main thread ArcMap uses for most of its own work [2]. As you change your Map contents in the TOC, the changes are reflected on the globes as well.