Latest Contributions by PeterKnoop

‎06-15-2020

That is close, however, an org-neutral URL, using "www.arcgis.com" or "arcgis.com" still takes the user to a page with only the Download button present, even if they are logged into their org in another tab in their browser. The critical piece I am looking for is being able to run the Notebook right away, without the extra login steps, and to avoid the confusion of leading the user to believe they need to download/upload the notebook.

‎06-10-2020

Interesting. Your experience is not what others have reported. If you click on the link on this post, doesn't it take you to a page that lives at https://umich.maps..., which is not your ArcGIS Online organization? Therefore, the Open Notebook button is not present, as you do not have permission to run Notebooks in the umich organization. Did you click on the link in the post, and you were somehow redirected to view the Notebook's Item Details view on your own ArcGIS Online organization instead, so that you have an Open Notebook button? If that's the case, I wonder what is different for you than for others? Everyone else has reported that they click on the link in the post and are sent to the umich organization view, wether or not they are already logged into their own organization first.

‎06-03-2020

Knock, knock … Who’s there? … A lot of us! When I first began using ArcInfo and ArcView GIS many years ago as a student, I was part of a rarified group of workstation/desktop GIS users, representing a small number of departments on the university campus. And while such users are still well-served by what we know today as the ArcGIS platform, it is through its evolution, from desktop to web GIS, that a new, even larger user base has been empowered with geospatial technologies. A community that now encompasses a majority of the Schools and Colleges at the University of Michigan, across all three of our campuses in Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint. With any enterprise-scale system, it is important to assess and understand its relevance to campus personnel (faculty, staff, and students). Such information is key to setting budgets and justifying expenditures, especially in this time of pandemic-driven monetary concerns and constraints. So how do we show that GIS is now used by more than just a few researchers from select disciplines and students in GIS courses? How do we illustrate the emerging impact of GIS on the university’s educational and research mission? And, most importantly, how do we communicate this message of broad adoption to our user community, as well as to the university stakeholders responsible for funding, maintaining, and supporting enterprise-wide systems, like the ArcGIS platform has become? University of Michigan ArcGIS Usage Dashboard Enter ArcGIS Dashboards, the app that conveys information by presenting location-based analytics using intuitive and interactive data visualizations on a single screen; because a picture is worth a thousand words! By combining ArcGIS platform usage data with information from our enterprise directory service, our University of Michigan ArcGIS Usage Dashboard serves to highlight the ongoing growth, depth, and breadth of GIS use at the university. Some of the dashboard’s key metrics: Registered Users -- Indicates how prevalent ArcGIS platform use has become on campus, and its growth over time. Examine the registered users serial chart and note the increasing slope of the curve. More and more people are discovering ArcGIS each year. Unique Logins -- Insight into the regularity of use of the ArcGIS platform. Individual use might range from a student leveraging ArcGIS StoryMaps for a single class activity during a semester, to a researcher using ArcGIS Pro every day. Units and Degree Programs – These pie charts illustrate the breadth of the impact of ArcGIS use across the university, in terms of both administrative divisions and academic disciplines. So what does our ArcGIS Usage Dashboard tell us about our University of Michigan community? The 5000+ registered users represent >5% of the potential user base of approximately 100,000 students, faculty, staff, and sponsored affiliates across the university. And while users come and go every year – particularly students -- the charts on the dashboard show a continuing increase in the annual user growth rate. The implication being there is still plenty of untapped potential for GIS use within the University of Michigan academic community. What does the dashboard tell our campus community and stakeholders, in terms our message above of broad adoption, “GIS for Everyone”? First, we can look at what unit a user is affiliated with; units are the individual Schools and Colleges of which the University is composed, and some users have multiple unit affiliations. The dashboard shows GIS users are drawn from 127 units, out of a possible ~175 across all three campuses. So over 70% of all Schools and Colleges have at least one GIS user among them. Second, we can examine which degree programs students are enrolled in, who are using GIS. (Keeping in mind that a student might be using GIS for a course in a unit other than the one in which they are pursuing their degree, research purposes in another unit, or self-education.) At the end of our last semester, of the 5000+ registered users, 3500+ were students. The dashboard indicates those students are drawn from 592 degree programs. With ~750 degree programs across all three University of Michigan campuses, this means nearly 80% of all degree programs have at least one student in them using GIS. Both of these metrics help illustrate that GIS can indeed be a useful tool for nearly anyone in our university community. Hence, we use Enterprise Logins and new member defaults in our ArcGIS Online organization to ensure everyone can access the ArcGIS platform, whenever they need it, without requiring manual intervention from the IT team. After all, a first-time user might be a student starting work on their assignment at 3 am the day it is due, or a faculty or staff member with some spare time on the weekend to explore what GIS might help them achieve. Whether you are in an educational organization, or one in a different industry, understanding how often the ArcGIS platform is used and by whom is important. Perhaps your organization is experiencing a similar surge in GIS usage, as web GIS expands your horizons beyond just GIS professionals. Build your own ArcGIS Usage Dashboard Are you inspired to build a dashboard to highlight the reach of GIS tools and technologies in your own organization? If so, then please check out our ArcGIS Usage Dashboard Quickstart Jupyter Notebook. [Note that the Notebook is shared with Everyone, however, due to the unfortunate limitations of ArcGIS Online's sharing model, if you click on the link to the Notebook above, then you will be viewing its Item Details page on the public ArcGIS Online instance (www.arcgis.com), so the only option you will have is to Download the Notebook. That's fine if you want to run it in Pro or your own local Notebook environment. If you want to run it on your ArcGIS Online instance, however, then avoid the download/upload process, and instead login to your ArcGIS Online instance first, then search for the Notebook by its item ID: "8cee96275677429685a28231752d9e67" (remembering to toggle the search to look outside of your own organization.) The result will take you to its Item Details page on your ArcGIS Online instance, which means you now have the "Open Notebook" button available to run the Notebook right away!] As a starting point, the Notebook provides templates for an ArcGIS Dashboard and a feature layer with a public view. It then leads you through the steps of populating the feature layer with historic usage data from your own ArcGIS Online organization using the Portal History method of the REST API. It also includes example code, on which you can base Python scripts, to automate updating your dashboard on a regular basis. What do you need to get started? Three things: The ArcGIS Usage Dashboard Quickstart Jupyter Notebook. An environment in which to run Jupyter Notebooks. Access to ArcGIS Notebooks in ArcGIS Online (Get started with notebooks), or ArcGIS Pro (Notebooks in ArcGIS Pro), or The ArcGIS API for Python and its SDK (install guide). An account on your ArcGIS Online organization with the default Administrator role, which has the required privileges for accessing your activity logs. The usage parameters tracked in this Notebook are only a starting point. You may want to track other parameters or integrate information from other authoritative systems of record in your organization. For example, our Units and Degree Programs pie charts incorporate data from our enterprise directory service. Or, you might add a chart illustrating the distribution of the number of people and how often they use the ArcGIS platform each month to get a feel for the proportion of heavy-users versus one-timers. Or, you might point ArcGIS Insights at your usage data layers, add in other data sources for your organization, and explore things in even greater detail. My hope is that this quickstart notebook will help you and your community gain deeper insight into your organization’s use of GIS. Lastly, thanks to my colleague, Abbey Roelofs, for assistance with our University of Michigan ArcGIS Usage Dashboard, and to Jim Detwiller for help testing the Notebook along the way to creating a Penn State ArcGIS Usage Dashboard. To learn more about ArcGIS Dashboards, see ArcGIS Dashboards - Useful Links. (Content also available as an ArcGIS StoryMap.)

‎05-22-2020

I would like to be able to provide a link to a Notebook in an email or blog post that will permit an ArcGIS Online user outside of my organization to directly run the Notebook. (This is assuming I have shared the Notebook with Everyone, and that they have the appropriate privileges to run Notebooks in their own ArcGIS Online organization.) Let's say I've set the sharing on a Notebook to Everyone. If I email someone the URL for the Item Details page for the Notebook (e.g., https://umich.maps.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=4387d037ff904112963283f9a72e114a), then the only available option for them is the "Download" button. So it appears to the recipient that they have to first download the Notebook to their computer, and then re-upload it their ArcGIS Online organization, before they can use the Notebook. If instead they search for the Notebook in ArcGIS Online (remembering to toggle off limiting the search to their own organization), then when they click on it in the search results, they are taken to an Item Details view that includes the "Open Notebook (Beta)" button. This enables them to get right to running the Notebook I have shared. Is there a URL pattern to follow whereby one can construct a Notebook link that will produce the latter behavior -- the user being able to click on the link and then immediately run the Notebook -- avoiding the download/upload confusion?

‎05-21-2020

Is there an environment parameter or attribute that can be accessed from within a Notebook in order to reliably determine if it is being run in ArcGIS Online or in ArcGIS Pro? We are finding that we often have Notebooks we want to use in both environments. Rather than having to edit the GIS connection info depending on where it is being run, we would like it to figure that out on its own. If it is running in Pro, then use GIS('pro'), and if it is running in ArcGIS Online, then use GIS('home'). For now, we are making that assumption that the Notebook environment's HOMEPATH is r'/home/arcgis' when it is being run in ArcGIS Online. If is being run in ArcGIS Pro, then it will have some other value; it being highly unlikely that someone has installed it on their own machine in "/home/arcgis", especially on a Windows machine. For example: homepath = %env HOMEPATH if( homepath == r'/home/arcgis' 😞 print( "ArcGIS Online Notebook" ) gis = GIS('home') else: print( "Local Notebook" ) gis = GIS('pro') It would be nice to have something that is well-known and authoritative to use instead though, so that we could rely on it in the long-run.

‎04-24-2020

Since one can now also share Notebooks in ArcGIS Online... for anyone looking for a starting point, here is a simple Notebook for gathering usage data based on counts of and openings of Notebooks: Notebooks Usage Tracking.

‎04-24-2020

Shannon, to go back to the original question, what is possible now, during the beta, for measuring usage? Using the ArcGIS API for Python, with search() we can find out who has a Notebook and we can count the number of Notebook items, and with usage() we can find out the number of times a notebook has been opened. Is there anything else available at this point? Is there perhaps more information available via the REST API? Thanks! -peter

‎04-19-2020

Hi Shannon, Our main goal for tracking usage is to identify who is using it and how they are using it, both to offer support and guidance, where needed, as well as to understand the benefits of Notebooks in ArcGIS Online for our users. It is also important to understand usage in terms of how Notebook will need to be treated and justified as a potential additional cost to using the Esri platform in our organization. For our purposes it is key that usage information be provided: per user -- We need to join the usage information to data from other enterprise systems and directories to form a full picture, such as a user's role (faculty, staff, student), enrollment (what classes are they currently taking?), degree program (what's their major?), and so on... per offering -- The three flavors Notebooks currently come in, Standard, Advanced, Advanced with GPU, (and their versions) to help ensure some of the comparisons we make will be done apples to apples. per time -- Users association over time can change. Being able to extract time-range snapshots of usage information will help us understand use cases tied to specific periods of time (e.g., a specific course a student might have taken, participants in a Data Science workshop series.) The kind of usage information we would like to have on those basis are: time of use -- How long was a user using a particular Notebook type over a particular period of time. credits -- Same as for time. I'm sure there will be a costing structure that relates time of use and credits, however, since that costing structure will likely evolve over time, it is important to track the two separately, so that we have a route to make apples to apples comparisons. Plus, there will presumably be credits used when running analysis, accessing premium data, etc., in addition to the credits consumed running the Notebooks themselves. Related to our thinking about what we would like see for usage tracking is the expectation that the same ArcGIS Online credit allocation will serve as a limit on Notebook usage, as it does for other aspects of ArcGIS Online. We have too many users, with too much variation in needs, to micro manage individual users' credit usage. We count on the credit allocation to serve as protection for users from mistakes like endless loops, and to guide them to seek advice where there might be a better, more economical alternative approaches to achieving their goals. Hope that helps! -peter

‎04-15-2020

Perhaps you would consider adding StoryMaps to the health dashboard? It is nice to have one place to go when things aren't working right, to see if it is a large-scale issue or "just me". Thanks!

‎04-15-2020

Is there a specific service status line that StoryMaps falls under on the ArcGIS Online Health Dashboard? I understand that issues with maps and layers hosted on ArcGIS Online, and used in a StoryMap, would likely be reflected in categories like ArcGIS Online, Hosted Feature Services, Hosted Tile Services, etc. I am wondering about the StoryMap itself specifically. For instance, if users across our organization are beginning to experience frequent, "An unexpected error has occurred," messages, where should I look in the Dashboard for a hint that it might be bigger problem, and I know Esri is already working on it, versus something for which I need to open a Support Case?

‎04-08-2020

Is there a way to access statistics or a log with information on who is using and how much use Notebooks are getting in our ArcGIS Online instance?

‎01-09-2020

Hi Mark, As long as each user using the shared machine is logging into the machine with their own Windows account, then there should not be any problem. The ALLUSERS=1 parameter in the installer options shared above, installs ArcGIS Pro in a single location, and makes it available to all users on that machine. When each user runs ArcGIS Pro, their user-specific settings for Pro -- such as their cached authorization info -- is stored in that user's Windows profile, so that only that user's Windows account has access to it. If the users of your shared machine are all logging in using the same Windows account, then it would be a problem. They would be accessing the same Windows profile, so whomever last logged into to Pro on that machine would have their Pro authorization cached in that Windows accounts' profile. -peter

‎01-06-2020

Hi Mark, Not in an unexpected way. Pro caches the info from a successful login, so a user doesn’t have to login every time they start Pro. Once the authorization times out, however, they will have to login again. That auth info is cached in the user’s profile, so if you’re not deleting it from the profile — or deleting that user’s profile itself —after the user logs out of the shared machine, then it will still be there the next time they login to use that machine.

‎12-14-2019

Another 3D Analyst tool you might consider for tasks like this is Minimum Bounding Volume. I find Minimum Bounding Volume to be very convenient for converting points to volumes in the context of archaeological excavations. I use it to turn the points that define the often uneven boundaries of levels (or contexts, or stratagraphic units, or whatever your preferred terminology is...) into closed multipatch features (i.e., 3D volume representations.) I use ArcGIS Pro, though if you are a Desktop user, it also has a version of this tool, Minimum Bounding Volume - Desktop. As you've already done, the first step is loading the data from your Excel spreadsheet into a point feature class. You did not provide the coordinate system for your data; however, since it looks like an arbitrary example with units of meters, picking a coordinate system, like UTM, should do for this example. I arbitrarily choose to work with your data in my local UTM Zone. Otherwise, by default, ArcGIS may assume a coordinate system that treats your X and Y values as degrees longitude and latitude, and your Z value as meters. As you can probably imagine, it would then take a lot of vertical exaggeration for a few centimeters of elevation difference to show up in a 3D view of your Level, when it is being treated as one-degree in areal size. Not to mention that you might get some very unexpected volume estimates as well!) (I notice that your data seems to go up in elevation from your Start of the Level to the End of the Level, for point pairs with different elevations, rather than down, as I would expect for excavation. Your data will still work, however, it places your Start points below your End points, when you visualize it.) The second step is to generate multipatch features from each Levels' points. In your sample data you only have a single Level. Assuming your full data set contains more than one Level, then you would want to use the Level column to indicate which points should be grouped together to form an individual Level's volume. Because you have duplicate points for the same Level, you will see a warning message about such points being ignored in creating the multipatch feature. (When you have more than one Level in your data, then you should have points with duplicate coordinates, however, they will be associated with different Levels, so that won't interfere with each other; one Level's ending point is another's starting point, until you hit the bottom.) when running the tool, checking the box for "Add geometry..." will add an attribute, MBV_Volume, which will contain the volume of your Level. This is not an auto-calculating attribute, however, so if you edit your multipatch feature, then you will want to re-calculate this field (e.g., Update Feature Z.) Why would you edit your multipatch features? If you surveyed your "duplicate" points multiple times -- maybe it took more than a day to excavate a level, then the inaccuracies of the survey method will likely produce slightly different coordinates each time. So you might edit the multi-patch feature's vertices to average the difference, or to ensure one Level's vertices snap to an adjacent Level's. Also, because of those duplicate points, you will get an area that may not agree with how you are thinking of the area of this feature. Keep in mind that the whole "square" area is defined by the points you provided, however, more than half of the area the tool identified also has zero-thickness, and is, therefore, not part of the actual multipatch feature. If you visualize the resulting points and multipatch features in a Local Scene in Pro, then you can see the 3D shape of your Level. Something like this: In practice, levels/contexts/stratagraphic units can end up with some fairly convoluted shapes, so I would strongly recommend taking the time to visualize and explore the resulting multipatch features, before trusting their volumes (or areas). The "Concave Hull" method usually does the right thing, however, occasionally you may find that you need to manually drop some points that are duplicates or superfluous, which are confusing the algorithm relative to your expectations for the shape of the volume. Hope that helps!

‎12-11-2019

Below is an example of the silent install options we use in many of our computer labs. Since you are using Named User licensing, you can point to your organization's ArcGIS Online instance, rather than the generic www.arcgis.com, to potentially save users steps logging in. This is especially handy if you have configured your instance to use Enterprise Logins for users, and configured Enterprise logins as your only login option. Then your users are sent straight to your single-sign-on dialog when they start-up Pro, rather than having to fill out Esri's generic login dialog and find their way to your organization. msiexec.exe /i <path to installer>\ArcGISPro.msi \ ALLUSERS=1 \ SOFTWARE_CLASS=Professional \ AUTHORIZATION_TYPE=NAMED_USER \ License_URL="https://<your org>.maps.arcgis.com" \ Portal_List="https://<your org>.maps.arcgis.com" \ CHECKFORUPDATESATSTARTUP=0 \ LOCK_AUTH_SETTINGS=TRUE One important note: make sure you specify the parameters in the order presented above! (The installer for ArcGIS for 2.4.2, and maybe any 2.4.x, introduced a bug whereby it does not properly parse the command line arguments, so re-arranging them can cause unexpected failures. For example, if you construct your command line in the order in which the parameters are explained in the documentation, then the installer will report success, however, the settings you specified will not be applied correctly, and you will get errors or unexpected behaviors when you try to login to Pro.)

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My Ideas

Latest Contributions by PeterKnoop

Re: Appropriate URL for sharing Notebook outside of organization?

Re: Appropriate URL for sharing Notebook outside of organization?

GIS for Everyone (...and how to build your own ArcGIS Dashboard to show it!)

Appropriate URL for sharing Notebook outside of organization?

Configure Notebook connection info to support use with both Online and Pro?

Re: How to track Notebook usage?

Re: How to track Notebook usage?

Re: How to track Notebook usage?

Re: StoryMaps and the ArcGIS Online Health Dashboard

StoryMaps and the ArcGIS Online Health Dashboard

How to track Notebook usage?

Re: ArcGIS Pro Named User Licenses and computer labs

Re: ArcGIS Pro Named User Licenses and computer labs

Re: Calculating volume of archaeological excavation levels from points

Re: ArcGIS Pro Named User Licenses and computer labs

Re: Get an Early Look at What's Next in ArcGIS Onl...

Default "Collaboration coordinators only" to off i...

Honor StoryMap URL redirect whenever going to view...

Support saving dark themed StoryMap as PDF with da...

Re: Georeference an image in 3D (VCS)

ArcGIS Indoors for Higher-Ed User Group