Is anyone using Portal successfully right now?

[VenusScott]

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?"

[SteveCole]

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.

[JakeSkinner]

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:

[VenusScott]

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

[DerekLaw]

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:

• Seneca Resources Corporation
• Seneca Resources presentation

Hope this helps,

[JamesPierce]

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.

[ScottFierro]

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.

[PaulDavidson1]

Scott:

I am curious about one thing...

As I understand it, there is no difference in the cost of Named Users between Portal and AGOL.

Same pricing structure, is what I was told.  (licenses are not the same though.)

Curious then as to why AGOL would be cheaper for you?

I would have thought the exact opposite...  You don't have to spend time administering, standing up the hardware, etc...

[BerneJackson]

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.

[VenusScott]

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.