It’s not ArcGIS Enterprise.
I’d say the most common comment that I hear when learners introduce themselves in our ArcGIS Enterprise: Configuring a Base Deployment course is something like:
“Travis, we just got portal installed and we are ready to use Enterprise.”
And I hear this from just about everyone, not just those students getting their first experiences with ArcGIS Enterprise. As I explain in my blog about how ArcGIS Enterprise is like a car, here, the portal software is just part of a bigger system. The whole deployment allows you to leverage the pillars of a well architected system: automation, integration, observability, scalability, reliability, and security to help you meet your business needs. But the software supplied by Portal for ArcGIS is the part most folks interact with, so it’s easy to conflate the portal home application with ArcGIS Enterprise, and don’t even get me started on ArcGIS Online.
Think about what the word portal means. It’s an entryway into a bigger thing. And generally, from an IT perspective they provide single online platform that provides personalized experience to secured information. I was telling Travis that a student in a recent class asked if the Enterprise portal was like a library. And my answer is a resounding, “yes!” Let me explain.
Many libraries are open to the public, but that isn’t always the case. It might be at a secure facility or have limited access to only the employees of a certain business or “organization”. Sometimes, there is some form of identification that is needed to even get into the library, and once you are there the items available to you could be restricted even further based on the sensitivity of the content. Most libraries have a variety of types of content like books, magazines, DVDs, games, and much more. The items are cataloged in an orderly systematic approach that are curated by one or more librarians. Sometimes you can check out an item, and other times you are limited to only using the item while you are in the library. Hopefully, the library is pleasant place to hang out at, and you might even be able to find a space where you could meet with your friends or colleagues to collaborate on a project. You might be thinking:
“Yep, that sounds like a library to me. But how does that relate to the ArcGIS Enterprise portal?"
Relating the portal to a library
You may think only ArcGIS Online could be considered a public library, but ArcGIS Enterprise could be too. It depends on your organization’s needs, and aversion to risk. There are some organizations that do expose ArcGIS Enterprise to the internet, allow what’s called “anonymous access” to the system, and share some items with everyone. Although this is kind of uncommon, and most deployments of ArcGIS Enterprise are limited in access and network exposure. Now I hear you saying:
“Gotcha Travis! You just said the portal is the system.”
Well... not really. The main function of the ArcGIS Enterprise portal is to act as a content management system, and they connect people to things and capabilities. It’s not the total security picture, but it’s a big part of it. In ArcGIS Enterprise the portal software supplies the system’s look and feel, the methods of authentication, item access, and even has included apps for content creation (Travis will talk more about that in the next blog).
To manage the accessibility of the content in the portal, what we specifically call “items”, it must be cataloged. The Enterprise portal allows creators to make an item, decide what someone can do with the item, where the item can be used, and who can use it. As an example, a publisher could create a feature layer that supports web based connected editing that is shared with a specific group of field data collectors for use in a web map designed for ArcGIS Field Maps.
There are many types of items that can be curated by the Enterprise portal. Some items are file based and require the use of specialized installed desktop applications to use. But because Enterprise is designed for SOAs, most of the items reference or connect to GIS web services in some way. The general model, what Esri calls the geoinformation model, is that web layers are used to make 2D web maps or 3D web scenes. These web maps and scenes are comprised of a basemap layer that provides visual and geographic context and one or more operational layers that are the business layers of the map or scene. And while maps and scenes are great on their own, they are even better in focused web and mobile apps with business focused tools that can also include access to other types of GIS web service-based items from the portal like web tools for analysis or locators for geocoding as an example.
But just having all these great and useful items is kind of like walking through the stacks in a library. Good luck finding what you need. So, the Enterprise portal has indexing and search capabilities to help people find the right thing. We use a gallery approach to organize items for browsing based on whether you own the items or how the content has been made available to you. And the administrators of the ArcGIS Enterprise deployment can even open the world of the ArcGIS Living Atlas and/or ArcGIS Online to the organization.
For completeness, the portal software has multiple web applications that people use to interact with it. There’s the most commonly used application “the portal” is sometimes referred to as the “home app” because “home” is in the URL to the front page, and this is a the app that users typically interact with. But the software also has web apps for more fine-tuned sharing and administration that most non-administrators have never seen, let alone used.
To summarize, the portal:
- Is the entryway into ArcGIS Enterprise
- That provides content management capabilities
- Of items that are created by people in the organization
- And shared with others through a centralized security model to define access to those items
See? Kind of like a library.
