Community

Change My ESRI to be user centric rather than org centric

704
2
01-04-2023 07:30 AM
Status: Open
Labels (3)
GoWest
by
New Contributor III

Make MY ESRI a User centric landing page rather than Organization centric landing page.  I know many users who have multiple ESRI accounts because they are associated with Organizations.  As people change jobs, or graduate from university, they cannot take their ESRI Accounts with them.  This means that all of your Training certificates, classes you've taken, and community awards are also lost.

I know we can email support and have our accounts merged and modified, but there is no self service tool to manage our accounts.  It would be nice if MY ESRI is the main landing page for all profile information.

In addition, I added a capability in my screenshot to allow the user to switch between accounts for licensing purposes.  Having one login simplies the user experience.  There have been times where I am working with multiple ESRI customers and having a simple radio button to switch the account seems a lot easier than having multiple logins.

 

GoWest_0-1672846191368.png

 

Tags (2)
2 Comments
JRosalesGIS
by Esri Regular Contributor
‎01-04-2023 08:04 AM

Hello @GoWest -- I'll defer to the experts with regards to My Esri but I would like to share my blog with you: https://community.esri.com/t5/esri-technical-certification-blog/esri-academy-training-and-certificat... in this blog, I explain how to merge your certification related accounts. I hope this is helpful. Best to you.

ChristopherCounsell
by MVP Regular Contributor
‎01-04-2023 09:46 PM

To effectively maintain a personal user account for training and community discussion:

  1. Create an Esri Account. This is going to be your dedicated user account for training, community forums, etc. Connect it to your long-term personal email and make a good name.
    • You can use an existing account, but do not use one that's connected to ArcGIS Online that you don't administer or will leave, as the account is managed by ArcGIS Online org.
  2. To gain access to training, request this user account be invited into one or more organization sin My Esri. 
    • You retain ownership of your account. You can leave, or be disconnected by admins, but will 'own' the user account.
  3. Don't use this account to join an ArcGIS Online organization, except for maybe a personal/developer subscription that you will own and administer.
    • Unlike My Esri, ArcGIS Online subscriptions own the user accounts. If you leave, an admin will need to disconnect you. This can be hard to do.
    • If you need to join an ArcGIS Online organization, have the administrators create a new account for you. Typically this is tied to your work email and has a naming convention.
  4. If you need to do training, do it with your dedicated personal user account, and access licencing to ArcGIS Online / Pro etc through the second work or uni dedicated account.

As it seems you're working in this space a lot, I'd recommend reading these two posts:

https://community.esri.com/t5/my-esri-blog/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-my-esri-admin/ba-p/888059

https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-online-blog/esri-and-arcgis-online-accounts/ba-p/890270

Things to note:

  • My Esri is the self-service window into a business relationship with Esri. It's designed for organizational accounts to access licencing, products, services - things that come with an account.
  • A user account can be connected to no, or as many, organizations as you like in My Esri. You switch the organizations through the My Esri interface.
    • e.g. I can switch between my personal-use and work organizations by clicking org. number.
  • A user account can be connected to no, or one, ArcGIS Online organization. Connecting a user account to ArcGIS Online places 'ownership' of the account within the org. 
  • You can 'switch' user accounts on My Esri or ArcGIS Online through top-right user profile button. This is useful for when you are administrating multiple ArcGIS Online organizations for one business. As these accounts become linked, you don't really want to do this across multiple businesses in My Esri.
  • If you complete training under a different account, you can go through the accounts team to merge that with your dedicated user account. This may happen if the organization doesn't want to provide training access to external user accounts for whatever reason.

While I understand where you are coming from, I consider this idea to be already offered. The above seems a bit complicated but I think of it as Esri giving users a lot of options to manage user access to licencing and training etc. Lots of advantages if it's done well.

Happy to help with anything else, though may be better to post as a question. Thanks!