I'm trying to help figure out a way to get around this for end users in one of our offices, and a solution that will work for other offices that do a similar workflow.
In ArcMap, most of our offices have a series of MXD files, 1 to 10 of them in most cases, that have all of our regularly used layers in them, with official layouts, dynamic text, dynamic legends, all preset. The user opens the map, zooms to the area of interest, changes a few layers if needed, changes the title, and prints the map. These MXD's are read only, which forces the end users to save it as a new MXD file if they want to keep it for the future and keeps them from changing the clean slate for the next user.
It makes it very easy for most of our users to get a map product out for the record or public use, without having to build something every time.
So, in ArcGIS Pro we want to remake this and I've tried the following...
1. Map File. Doesn't contain layout information, only the map tab, requiring everything else to be done again or a Layout Template to be imported. This is an extra step that is too much for many users.
2. Project Template. This SHOULD be the answer but it completely copies everything into the template file for some unexplainable reason. The result is a corrupt template file that never finishes creating, or a template file hundreds of gigabytes to terrabytes large as it pulls in imagery and everything else.
3. Save As new project file, Read Only.
The best thing I've found so far is #3, but even when you "Save As" to a new folder, as soon as it is opened the first time you get a folder created called "Index" which has two subfolders and is completely empty. This isn't really acceptable due to the location of these files, but I found I can make it a hidden folder and that somewhat works. Being that I've only tested this myself, I have no idea what issues this could bring in the long run with the default GDB's and other project related files from the original project import of the .MXD's, especially when many users start using these.
#2 above should be the correct answer, but considering the data duplication, it's completely unacceptable. Why? We use standardized datasets, some in File Geodatabases, much in SDE, and copying all of hundreds of layers worth of data then makes these orphaned snapshots of the original live datasets. More so, if this wasn't a problem, all of the unneeded data duplication balloons our backups very quickly. Our SDE data is almost completely statewide datasets.
The only way to fix this, that I've seen talked about, is to convert all of the layers to use UNC paths. I've seen no good walkthroughs or tools on how to do this. Multiply this by hundreds of layers in these maps, and you have a nightmare waiting to happen.
There's a big push to get 25% of our users into ArcGIS Pro this year so I want to be able to offer a solution that won't create duplicated data or data that is severed from the origin datasets. I can provide more information as required, screenshots/shares, and the like.
GIS - Getting it Surveyed is too expensive.
