Share to individual users - much needed for AGOL to be useful in business

[LeslieAraujo]

Our organization needs to be able to share items to individual clients. A lot of the time the information we are mapping is confidential, so we really need to have an easier way to do this that doesn't require the usage of groups - which are limited anyway. To be able to scale the usage of AGOL within our company, this something would really help. And note: Sharing in general needs to be refined. At this point, many sharing aspects of AGOL (ex: REQUIRING someone to have an AGOL account to see anything in the org) is a big road block. It translates into a complicated experience for our internal teams and results in a less-than-ideal experience for our clients - something that is unacceptable.

Maybe try exploring ways in which AGOL might be better adjusted for business instead of mainly focusing on public sector?

Someone else also posted about this a while ago: How can I securely share an ArcGIS.com online map or web app with clients? 

[MegHoole]

I think there have been several threads on Geonet related to this topic over the last few years.  Our organization is still looking for this functionality.  One idea to facilitate sharing to "subsets of the public" was to have password protected groups... 

[JohnMDye]

I definitely see the need for this. The Group-based access model certainly has some uses, but I also find myself constantly wanting to share with an individual or unique set of users, which means I'm constantly creating different groups with different user sets. Overtime, that becomes unsustainable.

I think one way to get around this might be to have an additional option to create a group for each user, naming that group after the user - let's call this a "Named User Group".

Then, you could share just with one or many individual users by sharing your content with the specific named user groups without having to create yet another group, and simultaneouslyyou could also share with groups of users in the traditional sense.

This is technically already possible with the Python API and with Webhooks being introduced at 10.7, you could automagically create the group when the user is onboard as well. However, I'd be hesitant to do this without some insight from Esri as I'd not want to cause performance issues due to having a huge number of groups (1 per user + all of the adhoc groups).

Philip Heede‌ or Kelly Gerrow‌ - could either of you shed some light on whether or not this might be a  problematic workaround?