Using a single login with multiple users

[SteveCline]

I teach High School GIS and we also have an institutional account with AGOL.  It was suggested to me recently that, instead of creating an account for every student I should just create one account for all students in each section of the class.  The advantage would be that I do not have to manage multiple institutional accounts.  As of right now, the way we receive the account is through a grant which allocates them as 100 users per institutional account.  Therefore, if I exceed 100 I have to maintain them on more than one account.  There is no problem getting more slots but it gets cumbersome when structured this way.  We will also be expanding our user pool to include some science students as well so our numbers will increase even more.

Are there any usability issues with the idea of giving all users in a class the same login and password?

Thanks - Steve Cline

[TimWitt]

If this is a paid Organizational account I think you would run into legal issues. I think each account needs to have a named person that is only allowed to use said account. I would contact your ESRI rep to see what way you should go.

[MichaelThompson2]

Using a single login for multiple users is typically a bad idea. Anyone sharing a login has access to the maps and apps created by all other users sharing the login. Files will magically get deleted or modified and accountability is almost impossible without unique users.

If you're data is worth securing it is best to secure it the right way and give everyone their own login. The headaches created by sharing logins are usually worse (many times much worse) that the drudgery of maintaining individual user accounts.

[KevinMacLeodEV]

I would suggest Esri consider this:  allowing multiple people at once to use a viewer account.  So that an app with secured services can be accessed by people by distributing one login.  This is a very, very common question.  I would understand if they would charge more than what a single Viewer license costs. But hopefully less than, say, hundreds or thousands of Viewer licenses for every single person across a large Org. 

I am not suggesting multiple logins for editing, or any other user type. Only Viewer, read-only.  The most basic level.  I understand why multiple people using the same editing user would be a bad idea and agree.  

But there are so many times people have data they do not want to share publicly but do want to broadly distribute. This would simply make the platform easier to use and to scale.  Which in the long run I think would be more profitable for Esri (increasing/retaining marketshare) than the small number of Orgs who would buy batches of Viewer licenses.  I think most people when they hit this wall, just go a different route.  So I think if this was added to the Esri road map it would make users happy, and help build Esri marketshare and product use, and thus presumably translate to revenue. 

For example, I have some things our company could massively scale and leverage AGOL for to serve out, but it would require this idea to be implemented.  Esri product managers please feel free to message me. I will also be at UC.