Campus Operations Blog

Deploying ArcGIS Indoors is a major milestone. Bringing together CAD drawings, floor plans, building information, and space data, all in disparate formats, from across an organization requires significant planning, collaboration, and technical expertise. When the deployed system finally goes live, it feels like you've reached the finish line.

In reality, you've only just reached the starting line.

When the University of Denver (DU) first reached out, the situation sounded familiar. They had a commercial space management platform that had served them for years, but it was no longer scalable. Facilities data, space records, and GIS lived in separate places. Reporting meant chasing down exports and manually cleaning spreadsheets. Changes happened informally, with no audit trail and no clear ownership over who was supposed to update what.

Read this blog post on how DU partnered with LandTech to implement ArcGIS Indoors to transform space management.

What started as a way to better understand DCIU’s facilities has grown into a powerful tool for managing space, staff, and resources more effectively. With ArcGIS Indoors, DCIU is creating a smarter, more connected approach to daily operations and long-term planning across its campuses.

Managing 11.5 million square feet of space across 10 global campuses requires a robust, modern solution. Faced with the retirement of its legacy space management system, the University of Notre Dame partnered with Cloudpoint Geospatial to migrate to Esri ArcGIS Indoors.

Discover how Notre Dame turned GIS into the central hub for campus operations by implementing:

• Automated Integrations: Seamless daily syncing between CAD floor plans, employee data, and the university's Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS).

• Custom Space Governance: A bespoke Space Management solution built with Experience Builder developer edition, featuring strict Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and detailed edit history.

• Campus-Wide Accessibility: Interactive web apps and dashboards making space and asset data available to the entire facility management community.

Ensuring safety across a large school district requires more than traditional emergency plans. For the Palm Beach County School District, the tenth-largest school district in the United States, protecting students and staff means preparing for emergencies across hundreds of campuses and thousands of buildings. 

In recent years, CSULB has embraced Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a foundational technology to modernize campus operations, improve safety, and enhance data-driven decision‑making. By creating a unified geospatial platform, the university has mapped its underground utility infrastructure and integrated this data with digital and hard copy as-built documentation, track ADA accessibility corrections, create dashboards displaying ecological and sustainability benefits analyses from tree data, map fire and safety equipment, provided time critical spatial data for construction management teams, map facilities managed assets and create an integrated repository of building floor plans as well as active operational chargeback work orders. This digital revolution has transformed how Physical Planning, Energy, Construction & Facilities Management operates every single day.

Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) just went district-wide with an ArcGIS Indoors implementation, mapping over 27 million sq ft of space across 220+ campuses.

This project isn’t just about maps, it’s about breaking down data silos, improving safety, facility management, and empowering organizational workflows with a single source of truth for facilities and operations. From indoor navigation to asset management and real-time collaboration, WCPSS is setting a new standard for smart campus operations.

Read the full success story to see how GIS is reshaping school districts!

Managing underground utilities on a campus can be challenging, especially when as-built records are outdated, incomplete, or flat out do not exist. Here's how Brigham Young University-Idaho utilized thermal imagery to improve our smart campus GIS.

I created a data integrity system for my university's campus tree inventory. In this blog, I will explain the tree inventory system we used and the steps I took to enforce data integrity using a tool called Contingent Values in ArcGIS Pro.