Will distributed collaboration allow access to basemaps?

Question

I have an enterprise deployment and I’m thinking about setting up a distributed collaboration between my portal and my organization’s AGOL. The main reason for this would be to get access to ESRI’s imagery basemap for offline use in Collector (if you’re not part of AGOL, you cannot use ESRI basemaps in offline Collector maps). Will this give me the access I seek or will I still be out of luck? I wish it was as a simple as me testing this out myself, but I have to go through a lot of people before I can test anything and figured someone might be able to answer my question right off the bat.

MKF62 · Answer

I am able to use it in Portal, the problem comes when you try to take the basemap offline in an application like Collector. It will not allow you to use it unless you're logged in as an AGOL subscriber unfortunately. You can see the functionality limitation highlighted in the little gray "Note" box in this document: https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/portal/latest/use/take-maps-offline.htm

I might have been a little unclear in my use case when describing my question; I have a Portal account and my AGOL account. I am not an administrator on our AGOL subscription, but I am an administrator of our Portal so I can control the membership. The members of my Portal are not members of our AGOL subscription, so while they would be able to see the ESRI imagery basemap when logged into Portal or even on Collector when connected to wifi, the minute they try to download the map in Collector for use offline, it will ask for AGOL credentials. The linked doc above explicitly states:

You can take an Esri basemap from ArcGIS Online offline with an ArcGIS Enterprise web map. To do so, you must have an account as a member of an organization in ArcGIS Online.

What I was hoping was that by setting up a collaboration, the portal members would sort of "inherit" permission to use the ESRI imagery basemap since the Portal would be affiliated with our AGOL subscription more or less, but I don't think that will work now that I read how explicit the wording is.

jcarlson · Answer

Are you positive that the imagery layer isn't just in the Living Atlas section of the Portal's content? We're able to use the layer in our Portal without any need to share it across from elsewhere. Subscriber content doesn't consume any credits, so you ought to be able to use it in your Portal without any constraints.

MKF62 · Answer

I didn’t test it, but upon more reading and in looking at the imagery page it has the little “Subscriber” badge, so I think even if I was able to share it through a collaboration, it’d just be a reference (not a copy) and would require members of my portal to have AGOL credentials which they don’t have. Bummer.