ArcGIS and Tiled Maps

Overview

You can design beautiful maps in ArcGIS For Desktop. You can ship the MXD file off to ArcGIS For Server to turn them into web maps.

But what if you want to create a map in ArcMap and then turn it into a map displayed in some less expensive web server?

1. Create map in ArcMap
2. Generate tile package
3. Copy tile package to server
4. Server unpacks tile package and service contents.

Voila!

Is this possible?

What is a tile package?

ESRI help page: About tile packages

What does "Enable ArcGIS Runtime Tools" mean?

What does it mean "Automatically select location" vs "Use user specified location"?

TPK file contents

It is a zip file, which is what I expected. Inside the zip are "bundle" files which are in "Compact cache" format.

unzipped...

esriinfo/item.pkinfo
esriinfo/iteminfo.xml
esriinfo/thumbnail/thumbnail.png
v101/Web Mercator Map/conf.cdi
v101/Web Mercator Map/conf.xml
                     _alllayers/L00/R0000C0000.bundle
                     _alllayers/L00/R0000C0000.bundlx
                     _alllayers/L01/R0000C0000.bundle
                     _alllayers/L01/R0000C0000.bundlx
.
.
.
v101/Web Mercator Map.lyr

Contents of conf.xml: File:Conf.xml - basically metadata including descriptions of the tile sets in the file.

What scales do I use

http://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/2009/03/19/how-can-you-tell-what-map-scales-are-shown-for-online-maps/