Groups - Join and Share

[Anonymous User]

Ok, I have to vent a little here. The recent changes to how groups and public/organization accounts are handled is the most assinine thing I've seen on ArcGIS Online yet. I've just spent 30 minutes going back and forth between a public account and my organization account and I keep getting these nice little pop-ups: "A member of an organization cannot join a public group", and "A public account cannot join a group created by an organization".

Really ESRI? So now if I want to create a group with a public account for a small volunteer organization in town, and share a published layer from my subscription to that group, I can't do it? Or if a group of students from the local university are working on a project and I want to share layers and maps with them I can't? Or a local Township creates a group so I can share their data with them, its not possible? Why has this turned into groups and data and layers either has to be ALL public or ALL private.....??

How the heck am I supposed to share data and maps from my organizational account to different public groups and public accounts now? Yes I can share a published layer to the "public" and they can search for it. But it was nice to be able to share something with a public group so that when a user that is part of the group logged in, they could immediately see the maps and layers I shared with them specifically. Now they'll have to search for everything?

I hope ESRI receives a ton of negative comments about this. Ridiculous. GIS for Everyone...what a joke with changes like this.

[AndyWells]

Just wanted to chime in here that I agree exactly with this. We were just getting started, our state organization has an account, with a limited amount of seats/licenses. We have one, but now we can't share data with anybody outside the organization, and I can't invite new users into the organization. At this point, the only real benefit to the costly organization account, is being able to use the feature services. Some of my maps just can't be released to the public.

[danbecker]

and public accounts can't share private data with other public accounts, when we used to be able to.
Unfortunately, this is always how "free" services eventually become. Unless you dev. the solution, you dont' have control over it...even if you purchase several licenses for desktop & server.

[South_JordanCity_of]

Couldn't agree more..
our organization would face about 17K a year if we were to pursue the subscription account. That's definitely not an option. ArcGIS Online was good up to now. I'm thinking about getting rid of it and build the maps and portal we need based on javascript.
Too bad, they really dropped the ball here.

[Anonymous User]

I've contacted my ESRI sales rep and customer service rep and passed along my comments, but I don't see anything changing. We're getting our maintenance contract in April and I'm leaning towards suspending my subscription. We have a local private GIS company that builds web applications and services using flex and other technologies. I may just funnel my $2,500+ a year to them and have them build me stuff rather than wasting my time with this.

[Anonymous User]

So this has been up for two weeks and I see nobody from ESRI responded. Sounds about right. I had my feedback forwarded onto the AGO development team, but I'm sure it fell on deaf ears. I'm going to continue to raise a stink about this, as this was an unwarrented change by ESRI. I have yet to receive a reason as to WHY this was done. The only excuse I keep getting is to provide more of a differention between paid and free accounts. That still doesn't justify not being able to share with each other.