Distributed Collaboration Access to both Organizations

[StephanieO1]

I have set up a distributed collaboration between my organization's AGOL and Enterprise Portal environment, but am struggling to effectively share a feature layer between the two. I would like the feature layer to be accessible in each environment without needing to sign in to the other environment.

I am not picky on which environment hosts the original layer, but all related maps and apps will be in Enterprise. I need the layer to be accessible in AGOL so my public survey123 survey can feed the data in to the layer. Right now, when I open a layer shared from AGOL in Enterprise it prompts me to sign into AGOL (which won't work since not everyone in my organization has an AGOL license). If I could avoid sharing the layer publicly on AGOL, that would be ideal.

Open to any suggestions that would allow me to use Survey123 results from AGOL in Enterprise maps and apps!!

[Joshua-Young · Accepted solution]

The only way that I have gotten that to work is to setup the distributed collaboration workspace as a two-way sync with the copy only turned on. Setting it up that way creates a copy in ArcGIS Enterprise and you no longer get the prompt to sign into AGOL. Then any changes you make in ArcGIS Enterprise should sync back to AGOL. 

That approach has its own problems unfortunately. Often the sync will start to fail with replication package errors. You will have to delete the version in ArcGIS Enterprise, remove the service from the AGOL workspace group, manually run a workspace sync, add the service back to the AGOL workspace group, and finally run one more manual workspace sync. You will lose any edits that did not sync before the errors start. The good news is the ArcGIS Enterprise copy should keep the same item name and service name, so you do not have to fix any maps or apps referencing the service.

Esri does not say it anywhere in their documentation that I can find but, in my experience, distributed collaboration sync by reference is only functional with publicly shared items.