topic Re: Is anyone using Portal successfully right now? in ArcGIS Enterprise Portal Questions

Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

VenusScott — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 15:56:27 GMT

At a meeting with an ESRI staff member, our organization was told that Portal is not being used in a production environment other than in huge Federal environments. We were told it is very complex (which I don't doubt) and that most organizations can achieve the same results with web configurations and ArcGIS Online. So my question is "Is your organization utilizing Portal in a production environment successfully right now?"

Re: Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

SteveCole — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 16:11:24 GMT

Short answer- ours (a County government) is not. We have some consensus within our organization to attempt to use Portal but when that actually happens has yet to be determined. We already pay for enterprise ArcGIS Server so I can't stand the thought of being nickel & dime'd by ESRI for an AGOL subscription.

Re: Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

JakeSkinner — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 16:28:41 GMT

Hi Venus,

I have worked with the City of Philadelphia and the State of New Hampshire. They both are utilizing Portal for ArcGIS for their internal mapping needs. For web maps that they would like to share to the public and others outside of their organization, they use ArcGIS Online.

If you have ArcGIS Server, you automatically get Portal for ArcGIS with a number of named user entitlements:

Re: Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

VenusScott — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 16:36:09 GMT

Thank you Jake. Based on the monitoring of this board, I was sure there were other municipalities using it successfully.

Re: Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

DerekLaw — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 17:33:35 GMT

Hi Venus,

Just to add onto Jake's response, I can assure you that many different sized organizations (from small to large enterprise), in many different industries, are actively using Portal for ArcGIS to enable the Web GIS pattern in their own infrastructure.

A great example is Seneca Resources, you can watch some videos here:

Hope this helps,

Re: Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

JamesPierce — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 17:42:24 GMT

As a public utility, we are planning on standing some stuff up with Portal. There has been some reluctance due to our firewall and data restrictions, also the lack of good info surrounding how we will use and serve up basemaps.

We have an ELA now, so its just a matter of time until we get it up and running for testing.

Re: Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

ScottFierro — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 17:47:15 GMT

We actually just finished doing an evaluation of Portal vs AGO options for Ohio DOT uses. Portal really isn't hard and was our preferred option for a number of reasons. We ended up deciding to use AGO instead due to implementation costs with the "Named User" concept. It's actually a bit astounding that despite having an ELA and the fact that portal is entirely run on your infrastructure the licensing is still done on a per named user level at insane costs that are negotiated as an extension to the ELA.

What Jake provided is based off doing annual maitenance on your licensing. If you are under the maintenance agreement and primarily focused on using Portal for web-mapping then it's great. It starts getting a lot more back and forth once you decide to implement collector and your named user base exceeds your "Entitlements" which can be easy to do if you have many filed users + office staff.

Certainly, a great question and a lot to think about and we spent easily a couple months reviewing things, planning and estimating usage and brining in ESRI reps to come to the decision. Still curious to see how it will work out because there are certainly pro's and con's to both solutions.

Re: Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

BerneJackson — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 23:28:36 GMT

We have been using it at the Coeur d'Alene Tribe for nearly a year. It's not that difficult to set up and we preferred it because it allowed us to have it on our servers where we control everything. Security has been somewhat difficult to get working for secured ArcGIS Server services correctly to the outside, but it works flawlessly inside our network.

Re: Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

VenusScott — Fri, 17 Apr 2015 14:44:04 GMT

That's what my impression was as well. For external secured services, I was still planning on using AGOL, but for internal maps and apps I want to use Portal.

Re: Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

VenusScott — Fri, 17 Apr 2015 14:45:03 GMT

You folks have been very helpful! I really appreciate it.

Re: Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

PatrickJackson — Fri, 17 Apr 2015 15:35:55 GMT

It is worth noting that Portal is intended to be an internal solution. There may be some means to get this working for external clients and it might be technically possible. This is where AGOL comes in and performs very well. Your initial plans are spot on Venus.

Re: Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

DerekLaw — Tue, 26 May 2015 20:26:43 GMT

FYI, new user success story using Portal for ArcGIS + Collector for ArcGIS,

Field crew gets online information with map-portal — Medium

Enjoy,

Re: Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

VenusScott — Wed, 27 May 2015 22:38:50 GMT

<sigh>This Websense category is filtered: Blogs and Personal Sites</sigh>

Re: Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

GISSupport3 — Thu, 28 May 2015 02:12:22 GMT

Just to add to the chorus of yes that there seems to be a conserted effort by "ESRI" to push an AGO solution as opposed to Portal.

This seems to have recently reduced slightly, perhaps as ESRI sees people using Portal differently to what they expected.

The named user pricing model is crazy and likely to hamper "licensed" application of what is a great tool.

Re: Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

BillFox — Thu, 28 May 2015 17:18:44 GMT

I found that if you want to take advantage of ArcGIS Editor Tracking with your internal Active Directory users you have to install Portal for ArcGIS.

I'm hoping to hear at this year's user conference that ESRI removes portal's named user pricing model or at least matches ELA user count of AGOL.

Re: Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

LeeHarding — Thu, 28 May 2015 18:03:27 GMT

First thanks for this discussion, I've saved a lot of research time (what is ArcGIS Portal?) scrolling through these posts in five minutes, and noticed this when looking for something else.

I fully understand why we have security. I've always been an intranet and internet are two separate things subscriber and save time and money and headaches that way. Yes to AWS if needed, yes to AGOL for sure, and yes to ArcGIS server internally.

Anyways, try another browser / firefox / chrome on the Websense thing, they didn't get to that yet...

Re: Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

JohnsonKosgei — Thu, 28 May 2015 18:59:12 GMT

Yes, we have used Portal successfully since it's early states albeit teething challenges associated to a new product (version 3.6). There have been deliberate action from Esri's side to reduce its complexity, make upgrading seamless, and improve on integration with other enterprise tools such as identity stores and SAML 2.0. That being said, it has been a great tool to share content and in general create awareness of location analytics across the organization.

Re: Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

DerekLaw — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 04:42:06 GMT

FYI, another user success story using Portal for ArcGIS,

Spatially Mapping Chick-fil-A Restaurants

Enjoy,

Re: Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

JacobBoyle — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 13:01:37 GMT

As Derek said above, Seneca has been using Portal successfully across our entire enterprise for a little over a year now. We have ours configured for onsite and offsite access for our employees. Portal was fairly straight forward to deploy, and many of the hiccups we had a year ago have been resolved, either through bug fixes or major improvements to documentation.

Portal serves as our spatial backbone, we are running several applications, both esri and 3rd party, that rely on the data provided. We have about a 75% user rate currently, with the majority of those people using it everyday.

Re: Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

AnasHomaidani — Thu, 18 Jun 2015 09:24:31 GMT

Yes, we have different clients in Kuwait using portal successfully. I should admit it was a bit complex at the beginning. I believe the named-users approach is the future.