AEC Project Delivery - Is Copy to AGOL Required?

[RyanUthoff]

I have a question regarding the AEC Project Delivery service that Esri provides. We currently use ArcGIS Enterprise to share all of our feature services and web maps to our end users, but we are looking into the AEC Project Delivery service as a way to deliver data to our clients (via AGOL). I have been reading some of Esri's documentation and blog posts, and I believe we would fall under scenario two (from the blog post linked below) where we would push our data from ArcGIS Enterprise to ArcGIS Online. Introduction to AEC Project Delivery

After reading this blog post: Use collaboration to support an AEC Project Delivery Subscription, it appears the only way to use AEC for project delivery is to copy the data to AGOL (as opposed to referencing the data from ArcGIS Enterprise).

My question is are there any ways to get around having to copy data to AGOL? I understand that we need to utilize distributed collaboration to copy the data to AGOL, but I was wondering if there are any ways around that where we could just reference the data instead? The reason I ask is because we would have to enable versioning and/or archiving on our databases (since copying data to AGOL through distributed collaboration requires sync enabled feature services which have versioning/archiving requirements) which we do not necessarily want to do (since other applications outside of Esri reads from these databases).

Are there any ways around having to copy data to AGOL using the AEC Project Delivery service?

Thank you!

[AndrewCreek · Accepted solution]

Thanks for reaching out Ryan. This is a great question and the answer is yes you can share data by reference between your ArcGIS Enterprise and an ArcGIS Online Organization.

AEC Project Delivery Subscriptions were created to provide a secure method for sharing and collaborating throughout a project’s life cycle. Sharing data by Copy is the recommended method and follows Best Practices. However, we realize that every project is different and multiple methods for sharing data are needed.

Sharing services and data by Reference requires taking a few additional factors into consideration. The first is that the end users will be accessing data coming directly from your internal ArcGIS Enterprise and they will need some form of authentication to do this. If this is purely internal this isn’t as much of an issue but if this is a client, then you must evaluate your security policies and possible licensing issues.

The second factor is that your ArcGIS Enterprise will be handling the extra load from these services as ArcGIS Online will only be passing through the data. This extra step in getting the data to the end user will introduce a performance penalty which may be negligible or noticeable based on your infrastructure.

I would be happy to set up a call so that we can discuss the workflow you would like to accomplish and any additional questions you may have.

[RyanUthoff]

Thank you for your reply Andrew. This helps me understand how AEC project delivery works a little better.

I understand that our end users would require two forms of authentication: the AGOL account along with our internal Portal account. Is it possible to do any sort of pass through authentication so that the AGOL account can authenticate with the Portal account without the end user needing to authenticate with Portal? For example, when adding a server feature service to AGOL as an item, I have the option to store the Portal credentials with the feature service so that way the end user in AGOL does not have to sign in to Portal to view the feature service. Is that an option with distributed collaboration and AEC project delivery?

Thank you for your help, I really appreciate it. I'd be happy to talk to you about this, especially if there is going to be a complicated solution (if there is any) to my question above. Plus, we might have more questions in the future about AEC project delivery and it would be helpful to have someone to reach out to. Thank you!

[AndrewCreek]

Ryan,

I will send you a DM with my contact information for further discussion. AEC  Project Delivery Subscriptions are simply an ArcGIS Online Organization or ArcGIS Enterprise deployment with a different licensing model that allows for tying it to a project. Anything that you can do currently in ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise you can do with a Project Delivery Subscription. 

What you will to ensure is that both you and your customer are comfortable with how the data is secured and shared. The AEC team at Esri is always happy to have the high-level data architecture and workflow conversations so  feel free to reach out.

[Kara_Lara]

Hello Andrew, I have an additional question. We're setting up our first PDS & I'm wondering if editable databases are required to be hosted on AGOL? I was thinking after reading so much info covering AEC PDS' that it sounds like in order for both our client & us to be able to be allowed to edit the same feature layers, they would need to be published feature layers added/uploaded to AGOL & shared to our Distributed Collaboration group which both our client & we are members of.

But then that got me thinking, if the map services in the same web map are hosted on our private & secure server infrastructure, then would 2 login credentials be requested for everyone at login prompt of the web app?

Thanks so much for your feedback!

[Alex_Reid]

We ran this version of AEC Project Delivery for a year and we did not do any copying. We have an on-prem server/Enterprise, published services from that, and collaborated between our AGOL Site and our On-Prem Portal. We then created groups specific to each client, sorted the data into those groups, and invited the users from our client's AGOL sites to the groups in our AGOL sites.

We created maps on our AGOL site with the referenced data.

We then created apps on the client's AGOL sites that consumed the maps on our AGOL site. The referenced data was secure, the clients could only see their own data, and nothing was copied.

Cons:

It was complicated, and clients couldn't edit the data.