Stretch Your GIS Muscles: The Flexibility of ArcGIS Indoors

[DerekLutchko_LTC]

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine your campus—bustling with students, faculty, staff, and visitors, each with their own needs and destinations. Freshmen are getting lost in that labyrinth of a historic building. Grant coordinators are trying to pin down researchers and the information they need for reporting. Technicians are looking for the right shutoff valve for the residential hall. The Site Safety Officer is discussing evacuation routes with local emergency services.

Now, imagine a digital map that not only helps them find their way but also adapts, flexes, and extends to meet the exact needs of your institution, regardless of the unique circumstances or quirks you may have.

Hands stretching outward

That’s the power of ArcGIS Indoors. At its core, it provides a strong, neutral foundational system of record for mapping the Great Indoors—offering a well-structured data model, out-of-the-box apps, and essential functionality for use cases including asset and space management, safety and security, and occupant and visitor experience. It gains a major performance boost from its seamless integration into the broader ArcGIS ecosystem and unlock the indoor GIS capabilities. That’s its superpower.

Things really get exciting when you start to stretch it, challenge it, and push it beyond the "limit"—by customizing and extending its capabilities to meet the diverse and complex needs of campus operations.

A Blank Canvas for Creative Problem-Solving

Don’t get me wrong – out of the box, ArcGIS Indoors provides a lot of immediate value, using the ArcGIS Indoors Information model as-is and relying on the Indoors configurable apps – But I’m a creative type, and I see ArcGIS Indoors as a blank canvas, a flexible framework that allows organizations to bend, stretch, and strengthen their indoor mapping solutions, whether it’s for improving scheduling, monitoring facility operations, or simplifying asset management. Through data model extensions, automation, and integrations, it can become the backbone of smart campus management.

While campuses share similar challenges, each has unique considerations that prevent a one-size-fits-all approach. Here are just a few ways we’ve seen our clients take their implementation of ArcGIS Indoors further:

1. Managing Research Grant Space Data

Tracking research spaces and ensuring proper utilization is critical for funding compliance. By extending the Indoors data model with additional fields, tables, and related records, and building an intuitive ArcGIS Experience Builder application, institutions can link spaces to specific grants, monitor usage, and streamline investigation and reporting.

Grant Research Data Management app with research activities in foreground.

2. Establishing or Complying with School Space Standards

Experience Builder application for K-12 space querying.Some institutions and even state education agencies are using ArcGIS Indoors as a foundation for standardized school mapping. By creating a common data framework, they ensure consistency in how indoor spaces are mapped and managed across multiple campuses or districts as well as inter-operability with other systems.

If your existing solution for space management reporting and compliance is low-tech, clunky, minimally organized, or just non-existent, ArcGIS Indoors provides a fantastic framework and can be an immediate upgrade.

Plus, it can be quick and easy to stand up with some help!

3. Ensuring Data Quality & Integrity

Arcade powered smart form.Data quality is paramount, with almost any dataset, and this is especially true for complex indoor datasets, particularly when extending that data model and applying it to your unique needs, programs and workflows. Fortunately, several approaches exist to address this, both within and beyond the base ArcGIS Indoors deployment. 

• Arcade expressions provide a lightweight approach for pre-determined calculations, automating data entry and reducing manual errors.
• Attribute Rules are included and can be expanded upon for more robust data quality.
• Domains and contingent values enforce data consistency, ensuring inputs align with predefined standards.
• ArcGIS Data Reviewer allows for automated and semi-automated error checking, in a robust extension that leverages attribute rules in ArcGIS Pro or ArcGIS Enterprise.

4. Leveraging Notebooks for Automation

There are two main pain points here that ArcGIS Notebooks can help ease. The first is data maintenance workflows. Reducing friction in this area is helpful for typically busy GIS teams. You may have heard the phrase “automate the boring.” That is exactly the idea.

The second is filling in functional gaps, answering the question: “Doesn’t it do this..?”

Multicolor screenshots of python scripts.ArcGIS Notebooks can be published as web tools that can be further leveraged in web maps or enabled through custom Analysis widgets in ArcGIS Experience Builder apps. With this approach, you can be creative with parameters and workflows to enable a simpler user experience, especially for those non-GIS folks that may be responsible for data maintenance and administration. You can get close to a “click-a-button” type of experience that enables a faster and higher rate of adoption.

5. Adding Context for Asset & Facility Management

ArcGIS Indoors isn’t just for space mapping—it provides critical context for other facility management operations, such as:

• Linking utility shutoffs to their precise indoor locations for quick emergency response.
• Tracking high-value lab equipment and ensuring it remains in designated research spaces.
• Documenting and understanding the location of asbestos-containing materials.
• Providing access to and context for CCTV feeds, for added security management.
• Manage inspection schedules and locations for fire extinguishers, eye wash stations, and other safety equipment.

6. Data Integration

ArcGIS is built for data integration. That’s not news to you, but it is an important concept to drive additional benefit from an indoor mapping system. We often see systems and data integration for asset management systems, work order systems, HR systems, and operational data systems, including IoT devices, sensors, etc. All of which layer on the value of the system when used as a foundation and framework.

Amplifying the Value of ArcGIS Indoors

No matter where an organization is in its GIS adoption journey, ArcGIS Indoors provides a strong starting point with endless potential. Whether through simple configurations or more advanced customizations, the platform can be stretched and strengthened to solve real-world problems across campuses with indoor GIS.

That’s where having the right expertise (and some creativity) matters. As a trusted Esri partner in ArcGIS Indoors implementation, LandTech Consultants helps organizations go beyond the basics—unlocking new efficiencies, insights, and possibilities through creative extensions of the platform.

This articles by no means covers all possibilities – in fact, it only scratches the surface. Tell me:

How are you stretching your GIS muscles to get more out of ArcGIS Indoors?

And if you haven’t yet, in what ways do you want to flex this great solution?

Let’s start that conversation!

LandTech Consultants provides survey, engineering, reality capture and GIS services. We focus on 3D GIS, digital twin development and have been working with ArcGIS Indoors since its release. We can support your organization in all aspects of Smart Campus enablement, from laser scanning, to floorplan creation, from full ArcGIS Indoors implementation to developing creative solutions to unique problems.

LandTech is a proud member of the Esri Partner Network and always eager to hear from folks interested in exploring the power of GIS. Contact our team at www.landtechinc.com/contact-us/ or by calling (978) 692-6100.