Hi AEC Community,
I'm about to implement ArcGIS Enterprise 10.8.1 for a large Engineering Construction contractor and need to understand how to successfully delivery GIS to major infrastructure projects from a technical and licensing perspective.
Our projects involve many parties (companies) who require access to our GIS, including subcontractors, joint venture (JV) partners and occasionally our client. Some of these organisations have Esri technology (AGOL or Enterprise), and others do not. For those parties that do not have an Esri platform, I've been told that I should be looking towards Project Delivery Subscription to satisfy some of the commercial aspects of our implementation, including 3rd party and upstream client access.
We have always delivered project GIS via Geocortex and are planning to utilise a SaaS Geocortex Web (GXW) solution, tied to (and authenticated by) our ArcGIS Enterprise. Reminder: GXW saves the web application to ArcGIS Enterprise as an item, not on another web server like the HTML5 viewer.
My concerns relate to the ability for GXW applications to participate in a collaboration group with either a) another Enterprise Portal or b) a Project Delivery Subscription organisation. Our Project Delivery Subscriptions would be architected as an "on-prem" ArcGIS Enterprise (i.e. not AGOL), as we have data sovereignty requirements to meet.
Specifically, I would like to understand:
- The ability for a GXW web application and all web map/scene data to be accessed by a collaborating party, given the mandatory requirement for security to be maintained (sharing to Everyone is NOT an option on projects).
- Assuming said security requirements, is item referencing even an option between collaboration groups? i.e. am I right in assuming that a user will require different logins/accounts in both portals for the content to work via referencing? (and what would be the point of that, other than to satisfy licensing requirements, particularly when we're putting Project Delivery Subscription in place because we can't invite client's to our portal...).
- If referencing is NOT an option, how does a GXW web application and all associated data (web maps/scenes/data) get copied to another portal and still work? It seems that Esri templated applications have a way to manage this, but I'd be surprised if it worked for any other web apps.
As a general comment, it seems that Project Delivery Subscription is an easy way to approach licensing for large infrastructure projects. That said, I don't think that the technical realities of working on such projects are fully appreciated, given what seems to be a very complicated solution to achieving system access for multiple participant companies. Are other AEC contractors finding the same?
Thank you for taking the time to assist. I'm happy to go away and draw diagrams etc. if that helps 🙂
Leon.
