My Custom Bookmark Manager/Map Book Generator Add-in

When I first got to Sandy City, there were some mxd's set up to produce a map book of all of our work management areas. The problem with making a map book of these areas is that they are irregularly shaped requiring different map extents. So the only solution was to use map bookmarks. To print the map book you had to manually zoom to a bookmark, change the title to match the area, press print and repeat for 20 areas! This got old very quickly so I developed an extension for ArcMap that did the work for me. I called it, "Bookmark Manager" (this was before ArcMap had it's own bookmark manager). It worked well for me and I thought that it was generic enough that others might be interested so I posted it on ESRI's Code Gallery.

Almost 3,000 downloads later, I'm getting emails from people all over the world that are using it. I had no idea that it would be this popular! It's been really fun to talk with them and see how they are using it.

The most common problems that people have with it are related to installation. With the old 9.x COM customization model, I had to create a custom setup project to install my extension. It was complicated and not fool-proof. So when I found out about the new Add-in architecture that ESRI introduced at version 10 I couldn't wait to implement it with my Bookmark Manager. Over the last few days I had some time to work on this. I now have my entire extension packaged into one self-installing .ESRIaddin file. I'm hoping that this will make sharing it a lot easier. If you are interested you can check it out in the new Code Gallery.

Anyone else using Add-in's yet?