Group collaboration vs. Distributed Collaboration

[deleted-user-RjK-SUCtPEWE]

In the context of ArcGIS Enterprise/Online, what is the difference between 'Distributed Collaboration' and 'Group collaboration'?

In other words, what collaboration-oriented problems does this new Distributed Collaboration capability solve that Group collaboration does not?

[MattGaffner]

It would be great to see an answer to this.  We have the same question.

[MichaelKelly3]

Groups allow you share content between users in specific ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise organizations. They also allow you share content between organizations in ArcGIS Online. The key here is ArcGIS Online - you cannot share ArcGIS Online content with ArcGIS Enterprise instances through groups. This is part of the reason why collaborations were added as they allow you share content between ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise (and also between ArcGIS Enterprise deployments).

A secondary factor here is where the content lives. With groups all content has a single owner. Collaborations allow you to duplicate the content so it lives in two places and syncs periodically. This is important where ArcGIS Enterprise is behind the firewall and not accessible externally to an organizations network.

So in many cases groups fulfill business needs, and they don't require much configuration. Where groups don't fulfill requirements collaborations are available. You can find more information in the following blog posts:

• Introducing ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise Collaboration Workflow
• Five ways to use distributed collaboration to share your data with others
• Sharing and Collaboration across ArcGIS Online Organizations

[MattGaffner]

Thanks.  That's helpful.  We can't seem to see shared content between our AGOL Org and the Portal we collaborated with.  We'll keep digging to see if we can figure it out.