What are your first thoughts about Collections?

[AravindStoryMaps]

Collections are a new way of bundling related stories together in a single location that can be managed by you, the author and viewed by your readers when shared.

Get started by logging into the new ArcGIS StoryMaps, clicking your profile picture in the header, and selecting My Collections (beta).

You can also use the URL: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/collections. 

This is the first release of this beta feature, and we'll be adding lots more capabilities in the future, but we'd like to hear your first impressions and thoughts:

• How was your experience of creating a collection and adding stories to it?
• Is there anything you were expecting to do, and couldn’t?
• Have you tried the present mode? How often do you see yourself using a Collection to present to your work to your audience?

[Caitlin_Dickinson]

• How was your experience of creating a collection and adding stories to it?
  • Easy and simple to add published stories. It was a little unintuitive to find 'My Collections' under my profile photo. It might be nice to have this surfaced somewhere else on the site.
• Is there anything you were expecting to do, and couldn’t?
  • Write more of a description under the collection title. I see that the 'Seven Wonders' example Collection has a paragraph introducing the StoryMaps, yet I am limited to 140 characters. I see Collections being a great solution for compiling individual students' StoryMaps into a class portfolio, and having the opportunity to provide more context about the collection would be great. 
  • Echoing Anneka France above, ability to add custom logos and renaming the numbers to be descriptive text would be nice.

[Anonymous User]

The collections feature is a great tool to separate chapters in a larger report we are developing. I did notice that when I navigate away from an embedded ArcGIS webmap (i.e., continuing to scroll down the report), the map will unload from the story. When I scroll back to that map, the map has to reload all over again. Hopefully this will be addressed in the final product. 

Thanks!

[JTessier]

Have been digging for awhile in your documentation about storymaps for ArcGIS Enterprise and have found little to no doc on the prerequisites and server/portal requirements for setting the new Storymaps up and enabling and disabling for Creators (and other user types, besides StoryTeller).  Will provide this feedback on other "Getting Started" docs.

[Anonymous User]

If I link within a certain chapter of my Collection to another chapter (i.e., item=8), the link automatically opens in a new window. It would be nice to be able to jump from Item 4 to Item 8 in the same tab using hyperlinks within the stories themselves.

This is what I'm working on, for example: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/collections/afda948e70b74e2daf0ff775653a9896