Customizeable default settings in ArcGIS Pro

ThomasUhrePedersen — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 14:48:42 GMT

Using ArcGIS Pro in an organisation which balances between decentralization and central administration it would be very useful if every default setting could be set by an administrator.

This would be especially useful because:

Several users who may not be especially knowledgeable about GIS workflows need to maintain organisation data. Thus without proper defaults supporting business workflows they either do somthing wrong, refuse to do it, or admins fearing disaster won't let end-users publish data.
In rarely performed repeditative tasks particular settings choices are often forgotten. As a result the resulting data quality suffers. And scripting is rarely an option outside the central GIS administration team.
Decentralized data maintenance are used througout the organisation.

Basically governance of the application and the organisation GIS data would be much easier if every default could be set by administrators. In many cases defaults can be controlled from a pro.settingsConfig file. But not in all cases. A few examples where it can't be controlled are Publish/Overwrite Web Layer and Geoprocessing Enviroments. I'm sure there are others.

Thus my idea is to enable pro.settingsConfig to set defaults (and locks) for every possible setting in ArcGIS Pro.

idea Customizeable default settings in ArcGIS Pro in ArcGIS Pro Ideas

Customizeable default settings in ArcGIS Pro