I am at the Microsoft Federal kickoff meeting this week, where we are looking forward to a great new fiscal year serving Public Sector customers. Seems an appropriate day for the Microsoft Virtual Earth team and ESRI to have announced an enhanced partnership that is going to allow ArcGIS 9.3 users one click access to Virtual Earth maps and imagery to perform data creation, editing, analysis, authoring and map publishing.

At last year's ESRI International User Conference, ESRI pre-announced a REST API to allow ArcGIS 9.3 users to integrate Virtual Earth maps in ArcGIS applications. But as of today, Virtual Earth is directly available as a premium service in the ESRI Desktop product and will be available with ArcGIS Server to follow.

Chris Pendleton, Microsoft Virtual Earth technical evangelist, includes the full press release, some FAQs, and screenshots in his Developer's Blog entry today.

To see this in action, come see us at the ESRI International User conference next week.