Zones and Organization Areas examples

[AaronKoelker]

Hello, we're working on figuring out ArcGIS Indoors (particularly for space planning) and I'm trying to learn more about Zones, Organization Areas, and the difference(s) between them. There isn't a ton of information in the help documentation on the best way to use these, and I can't really find any examples of them in action, either. Does anyone know of some additional resources and/or can point us in the right direction?

I also don't really understand how there is a dedicated Zones feature class in the Indoors Information model, but also this documentation mentions that the footprint needs to be contained in the Levels feature. (Perhaps the documentation is out of date, or meant to say that the Zone needs a corresponding Level ID?)

[MollyE]

Hi Aaron,

I can tell you a little bit about Organization Areas just from what I have figured out by creating a Space Planner web app for my organization, but I also have not been able to figure out what the Zones are, how they are different or how they are meant to be used.

Organization Areas involve the Areas table, the ORG_AREA_ID field in the Units layer, and the ORG_LEVEL_1 field in the occupants layer. From what I can tell, it's really only used within the Space Planner app because the Areas table is populated with randomly generated AREA_IDs when you create an area. The app will pull available "areas" from what is in ORG_LEVEL_1 field in the occupants layer. For each area you create, it will create a unique identifier number. I tried to create Areas in the table manually but it was not functional within the  Space Planner App afterwards, so it must be done in the app. The Areas table is not really meant to be manually edited.

When you allocate a unit to an Org Area in the app, it fills in the ORG_AREA_ID field in the Units layer with the corresponding UID from the Areas table. I ended up creating a domain because having those UID show in the Units layer was pretty useless, so now they can be displayed as a department name that makes sense to the user within other applications.

I have not messed with the office hoteling/hot desk assignment very much yet, as we currently use a different platform to manage that, so I'm not sure exactly how it works but it also corresponds to the Areas Table and (I believe) the AREA_ID field in the Units layer.

Hopefully this gives you a little bit of insight. I have spent over a month trying to figure out the Space Planner application and how to make it work for my organization's needs. I would have to agree that the documentation available for it (and other various Indoors layers) leaves a lot to be desired. Most everything I have learned has been from trial and error.

If you have any other questions, I'm happy to try and answer them.

[AaronKoelker]

@MollyE Thanks Molly, that was helpful. I've been playing around with it more the past couple days and am slowly wrapping my head around the workflow. Do you mind elaborating what you meant about creating a domain for the area id? Did you add one to the Units layer or Areas table? (Or both?) 

The more I read/play with Zones the more they just seem like an option for visualizing areas within Levels. For example, if you wanted a hatched symbology over a corner of the building that's off-limits or something. But they don't have much functional/organizational use. Think we're just going to ignore them for now. 

[MollyE]

@AaronKoelker Of course. I put the Domain on the ORG_AREA_ID Field of the Units layer. You can see from this screenshot that the codes it generates are very long and random, so I added a label to display something that will make sense to our users. I had to do this online, it would not let me do it in Pro, but that could be because of some sort of permissions settings, I'm still trying to grasp how that all works as well.

[AaronKoelker]

Ah okay, so as those you manually copied over the random strings into a domain after they were auto-generated, and then created the labels. Clever workaround, thanks!