The new members categories are a useful feature for managing users but I'd like to make a few suggestions to improve their usability;
Thanks
Anthony
Agreed, categories are a great step in the right direction but could definitely use some of these additional features, especially Anthony's second point, as well as being able to read/edit members categories via the ArcGIS API for Python: https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-online-ideas/add-new-member-categories-as-a-property-to-arcgis/...
Hello Anthony, Aaron,
Thanks for sharing your insightful feedback on this new member categories. The team was aware of those suggestions and has been working through some of those for the upcoming June 2022 update.
I have a question about one of the suggestions Antony brought up:
Can you please explain a bit of more on why and how you need different category themes at the first level? In another word, why the current category structure is not sufficient for your use case?
Much appreciated!
Julia
Hi Julia,
Thanks for your response. The categories are a great addition and will be very helpful for managing our users.
To clarify my point on the category groups in my use case I need categories for the internal business unit and whether a user is internal or an external subcontractor. At the moment it looks like I have two options;
The first option is probably best but it does mean having to enter the categories twice for internal and external, which is a bit clunky. The duplication would become more onerous if you then needed a second sub category. The second option is easier in setting up the categories but then I can only filter by one so wouldn't be able to filter by both business unit and internal/external.
These are of course fairly minor inconveniences but if there was a way to set up two groups of categories for business unit and then external/internal and then filter by both that would be the ideal. Then if you needed new categories these could be added as a separate group of categories, without the need to duplicate them as sub categories.
I hope that makes sense!
Thanks
Anthony
Hi Anthony,
Thanks for explaining your use case with us. It's very helpful. I will share back with the team.
Regards,
Julia
Hey Anthony,
As of today you should see a few changes in ArcGIS Online to meet the feedback you've provided here:
We're continuing to work through some additional ideas related to member categories, but wanted to give you a heads up on the latest enhancements.
-Jacob
Hi Jacob,
Thank you for the update on this, it's really encouraging to see these updates so quickly and is likely to make me want submit more ideas in the future!
Typically I have one other request though and just wondered if the role privilege could be split into two, one for creating the categories and one for assigning the categories? I think ideally we'd like to keep the creation of categories restricted but allow more users to assign them.
The other enhancements are going to be extremely valuable for managing our users so thanks again for your efforts on this.
Kind Regards
Anthony
Hey Anthony,
You'll be glad to know that we did in fact split those operations into two separate role privileges. When creating a custom role, "Manage categories" under "Administrative" > "Members" will allow a user to create/edit/delete the category schema for the organization.
The "Update" privilege under "Administrative" > "Members" will allow a user to assign/unassign categories to members in the organization.
The privilege descriptions should be updated here to reflect the two changes mentioned above as well -> https://doc.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-online/reference/roles.htm#ESRI_SECTION2_DE533C0ED3D546E1BA5B47C871...
Thanks again for your feedback on all of this. It has been invaluable to us and we look forward to more ideas!
-Jacob
Apologies Jacob!
That'll teach me to comment before reading all the documentation properly!
I did check the member settings and saw the "Manage categories" option and thought that was the only change. Hadn't realised that the "Update" option under Members had been tweaked too.
Thanks for this, that's exactly what we needed.
Cheers
Anthony
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