Which collaboration should I recommend?

[David_Brooks]

I'm trying to advise a client on the best type of collaboration to set up. Our client is the main business unit, with AGOL and Portal running. They have multiple contractor companies with their own Portals, who have enquired about sharing data via web services. 

Ideally, we would like to recommend a collaboration that enables web services to be accessible to all parties with access controlled by my clients AGOL acting as the Host. Therefore, I'm inclined to suggest that the Distributed collaboration is the correct model. However, can this be achieved with multiple additional satellite businesses? And can Portal services pass through from one Portal to another seamlessly? Is the access controlled by Groups in AGOL?

Alternatively, if we had separate Partnership Collaborations between AGOLs. Would we still be able to pull Portal services into AGOL and then have the partner organisation access these services via their AGOL? 

[JonEmch]

Hey there David, thank you for posting. Few things I wanted to bring to the table for your consideration starting with two of our blogs on this:

Distributed Collaboration with Shared Editing

Five ways to use distributed collaboration to share your data with others

You can set up access for multiple ArcGIS Online orgs by using groups (partnered collabs are a bit overkill unless you have good reason to do so). You would set up a collaboration between one main AGOL org and Portal, then add on other AGOL orgs to a group that also contains that item. The one tricky thing I would suggest you investigate is whether or not editing the data is part of the workflow. I would encourage you to test that workflow extensively before deploying it to such a complex collaboration.

[David_Brooks]

@JonEmch thanks for the response. We don't need editing in the workflow, so a partner collaboration sounds like the way to go. But can services that are registered via the portal, and shared to the host AGOL still make it through to the partner AGOL users via a collaboration Group?

[JonEmch]

Not quite sure, that might require some testing. I think in order to keep the dataset up to date, I would recommend that you use a partnered collaboration (I write about it a bit in that first blog I linked under the "Partner Collaboration" section.