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:
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.
Leon,
Thanks for reaching out about AEC Project Delivery Subscriptions. There are multiple ways to securely share data between Enterprise Portals using a PDS. Collaboration allows for sharing items by Reference and also by Copy for some datasets. At ArcGIS Enterprise 10.8.1 we also introduced Enterprise Export Packages that allow you to place your data, maps, and apps in a group and create an export to be imported by another Enterprise Portal.
Each Project Delivery Subscription is its own ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise Portal instance and requires a separate login.
I am including a few links to resources on AEC Project Delivery Subscriptions and Collaboration. These cover a wide range of deployment types including ArcGIS Enterprise to ArcGIS Enterprise PDS
Please feel free to message me, I would be happy to set up a call learn more about your workflows and discuss this more.
VertiGIS apps now follow the pattern of partnered collaboration, to achieve the technical challenges identified in the original question.