Easier E-Learning Access for ArcGIS Online Organization Members

[Suzanne-Boden]

Updated June 25, 2020. This post was originally published in 2017.

As of August 2016, all customers with a qualifying Esri product that is current on maintenance receive unlimited access to e-Learning on the Training site. With hundreds of e-Learning options in the Training catalog and more added each week, this benefit is pretty amazing.

Perhaps more amazing, anyone at a maintenance customer organization is eligible to take advantage of e-Learning to grow their geospatial knowledge and build ArcGIS skills. There's no requirement to have a product license or named user status. 

When we launched this benefit, access to e-Learning was enabled when an individual's ArcGIS account (public or ArcGIS Online organizational account) was connected to their customer organization on the My Esri site. My Esri administrators will still need to connect the accounts of individuals who are not members of an ArcGIS Online organization.

ArcGIS Online organization members, however, no longer need to be connected in My Esri. Instead, their e-Learning access is enabled automatically when an administrator enables Esri access for them in ArcGIS Online.

If you're a member of an ArcGIS Online organization with Esri access enabled, you can visit the Training site at any time, sign in with your ArcGIS Online organizational account, and access any e-Learning option that catches your fancy. If you're signed into your ArcGIS Online organization when you arrive at the Training site, e-Learning access is seamless (no need to sign in again).

If you're a My Esri administrator at a university or college, you no longer have to invite hundreds of student users to connect to your My Esri organization each semester. My Esri does offer the ability to set a time range for student access, however. If that feature is important to you, continue to connect learners in My Esri.

Note: E-Learning access cannot be automatically enabled for ArcGIS Enterprise portal users. Those individuals need to be connected through My Esri.

[ScottFierro2]

While this backend improvement is a great step forward I am curious if there is plans to extend this to include organizations using Enterprise logins?

It would seem to me those are the customers with the greatest needs for streamlined account management. While it will surely help some higher learning institutes and that's great, it doesn't alleviate those of us trying to do true Enterprise work. This in fairness is a minor item on our list of much bigger items in which ESRI falls short of entering something close to being an Enterprise application. In large part it seems the most common issues have been the inability to truly leverage Active Directory or some other authorization tools and carry those end-to-end in all ESRI products while keeping to singular accounts and a SSO experience for the users.

Just really hope to see this extended because we are managing 500+ users in our AGO currently with that expected to grow to 1000+ over the next year. The current workflows to get users Enterprise accounts established into our AGOL Organization account are tedious enough. We then have the additional steps after we enable their ESRI access where we must link them in MyESRI to get them access to the training that we train as an option to backup and expand upon our formal user trainings. Lots and lots of account administration stuff being duplicated after the fact since it's all done initially and correctly in Active Directory.

[Suzanne-Boden]

Hi Scott, I've updated the post to remove the statement the new access model does apply not to enterprise logins. Apologies for the incorrect statement previously published. We confirmed with our teams that as long as Esri access is enabled in ArcGIS Online, organizations that deploy enterprise accounts no longer need to enable e-Learning access via My Esri.

[ScottFierro2]

sboden-esristaff‌ thanks for clarifying and we took a few minutes to test the workflow and confirmed everything worked as expected. Great work to ESRI for this and this will drastically improve and assist in user management of our 500+ and growing AGO user base on our end. Thank you for streamlining this process.

[curtvprice]

This has been great in my educational environment. We use single sign on Enterprise logins now and I turn on Esri access. This has made life so much easier for our students and this part-part-time administrator, all I have to do is invite them, provide some guidance and the students are good to go with desktop products and training. Having the same SSO identity at our university, MyEsri, AGOL, and the training site makes life so much easier. Best of all, I don’t have to disable students when they leave the university, when their university email goes away a semester after they graduate, their accounts are automatically disabled, without me having to do yet another thing.

[Suzanne-Boden]

Thanks for sharing, Curtis--great to hear your account administration has been simplified.