Latest Contributions by OwenGeo

I'm a member of about 70 ArcGIS Online groups, which presents several usabilitiy issues with ArcGIS.com and other apps. Whenever I need to share an item to a group this requires scrolling through my long list of groups in a tiny window with small fonts to find the group I want. Explorer for iOS needs to ping all my groups to get thumbnails and the number of web maps, which can take a while on Wifi and longer on a cell connection. Many groups I don't actively use anymore, but would like to keep for archiving purposes.  It would be helpful to have some way to hide or archive a group so that it still is accessible (perhaps from a special view of My Groups), but no longer appears in my default list that is used for sharing and in other apps like Explorer. Also, it would be helpful to implement a filter box on all sharing dialogs (ArcGIS.com, Esri Maps for Office, ArcMap service publishing wizard, etc.) where the list of groups appears so I could quickly find the group I want. ... View more

Something to be aware of... Editing the name (or any other aspect) of an open data group disables its open data designation. You need to go back in an re-enable open data on the group if it is modified. ... View more

In March 2013, the capability to add other file types to ArcGIS Online was added. This included files like PDFs, Word/Excel docs, and images. When you find these files in searches or view them on a Group page, these new file types appear under the "Maps > All Maps" filter option. They should not appear when looking for maps, and there should be new filter categories added. Something like: Files > Documents and Presentations (PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) Files > Images (JPG, PNG, etc.) So the higher level filter categories could be: All Results Maps Application Tools Files ... View more

Below are some questions/observations/feedback on migrating to enterprise logins.  This applies to any customer that started using ArcGIS Online with AGO accounts and/or Esri Global IDs and wishes to migrate to using enterprise logins based on SAML (new in March 2013 release). Migrating content/groups When someone who has previously used ArcGIS Online with an existing organizational user account logs in for the first time with their enterprise account they essentially start over using a brand new account.  This means there is nothing in their "My Content" area and they are not a member/owner of any groups; all their content/groups must now be migrated by an Admin from the person's previous AGO account to their new enterprise account. �??With no migration process or official (or community sanctioned, maybe the AGOL Assistant is a candidate?) migration tool, this puts a heavy burden on the admin that increases as the number of users increases.  As the admin of an org account with ~130 members, I have to say I'm not looking forward to migrating everyone's groups and content (including all their My Content subfolder structure). �??Managing user accounts Any person logging in with their enterprise account is treated as a new user account, so the number of "users" in the subscription could potentially double after enabling this feature.  This is something the admin must manage by either 1) purchasing more users, and/or 2) methodically removing user accounts as people migrate to their enterprise logins.  As a result of this, I am also now considering a request to add more user accounts "just in case" we don't manage the migration to enterprise log-in properly so we don't exceed our current allotment of users. Ideally, it would be very useful for the system to migrate content/groups and clean up old AGO accounts during a person's initial login with their enterprise account.  After the first login with an enterprise account, the user would be prompted asking them if they already have an account in the organization, then they'd be prompted for those credentials.  The content would then be migrated, group ownership/membership would be transferred, and the old account removed. ... View more

This is a suggestion for Esri Maps for Office (Excel) to have the capability to view (or even edit) attribute information of a map or feature service. For example, if I seach for a map (or feature) service and add it to my Excel map, I'd like to be able to (from the layer's context menu) add the service's entire attribute table (or subset of attributes) to a specified cell range inside my Excel workbook. This would be very useful as a read-only view of the data, and would also be an interesting way of editing (feature service) attribute data as well.  If you modified the attribute information in the spreadsheet their could be a way for users (with sufficient permissions) to push those updates back to the feature service. ... View more

An undesirable side-effect of admins having view rights on all organizational content is that any item in the organization (including items not shared with the admin or items not even shared at all) is a candidate to appear in the search results for admins.   For example, there are several items with the keyword “Afghanistan” that have been registered by USER A in an org.  These items have been shared by USER A only to a private group of which ADMIN B is not a member.  However, when ADMIN B searches “Afghanistan” these items show up in their search results.  Additionally, the admins actually see search results that include organizational items that are not shared with anyone.   I can definitely see the use case for an admin needing to quickly find a particular item in their organization, no matter if it’s shared with them or not; this is a nice feature from an admin point of view.  However, admins are users, too – by that I mean that many people who happen to be in the admin role in their org likely also spend a lot of time just using ArcGIS Online to make and share maps and collaborate with colleagues.  In this case these extra search results get in the way of their day-to-day work since they are items that normally wouldn’t be visible to them/shared with them.   I might suggest an “admin search” feature for consideration in a future release.  This might be implemented like the “organizational search” has been with a checkbox on the search results page.  The default would be for admin search to be off so that only results shared with the admin user are returned in search results. ... View more

After logging in to ArcGIS Online, the initial page that loads for the different roles are currently:  - users/publishers: Organization Home Page  - administrators: My Organization Page These seem like the two pages that are the least used by customers actively using ArcGIS Online to create and share content. I believe it would be preferable to point everyone to My Content by default and also useful to add a profile configuration option where people could choose if they want their default login destination page to be My Content, Groups, the Map Viewer, their Organization Home Page, or their My Organization page. ... View more

Currently, only the group owner can share to a group public items owned by other users.  It would be beneficial for collaboration if any group member could share public items they don't own to a group. Perhaps there could be a checkbox on the group settings page for letting the group owner decide if other group members can share public content to the group or not. ... View more

There is currently no easy way to display currency and percentage data in ArcGIS Online charts and pop-ups. These are very common types of information and the system should handle them better whereas currently the user must manually format them. Additionally, if these types appear in charts there is currently no way to have them appear with customary formatting conventions (e.g., you can't put $ or % in chart mouse-over tips). Suggest adding "Currency" (US$ and eventually others) and "Percentage" field types. These field types should provide reasonable default formatting and enable appropriate formatting options in the Format Fields dialog. Currency would always be prefixed by a "$" and have options for only 0 or 2 decimal places. Percentages would show the user-selected number of decimal places, optional 1000s separator, and always be followed by a "%." Also an option should be included for moving the decimal point two places for all data (e.g., if the data stored 0.50, 0.01, and 0,35, then 50%, 1% and 35% could be shown). This suggestion would also apply in certain respects to ArcGIS for Server and the Geodatabase. ... View more

There's currently (ArcGIS 10) no easy way to determine when a geodatabase's license expires (workgroup or enterprise) short of inspecting the GDB repository tables.  It would be useful if this information was reported on the Administration tab of the geodatabase properties (this tab would need to be added to an enterprise GDB properties dialog since it's only there for workgroup GDBs at ArcGIS 10). Since a Database Server's licence expiration date might differ from that of individual workgroup GDBs, it would also be useful if the Database Server's license expiration was visible on the Database Server's properties as well. ... View more

There's currently (ArcGIS 10) no easy way to determine when a geodatabase's license expires (workgroup or enterprise) short of inspecting the GDB repository tables.  It would be useful if this information was reported on the Administration tab of the geodatabase properties (this tab would need to be added to an enterprise GDB properties dialog since it's only there for workgroup GDBs at ArcGIS 10). Since a Database Server's licence expiration date might differ from that of individual workgroup GDBs, it would also be useful if the Database Server's license expiration was visible on the Database Server's properties as well. ... View more