Latest Contributions by JohnMDye

ArcGIS Enterprise 10.8.1 introduced the Access Notice, which is a great and fantastic capability for ensuring user's are informed of really important items. While the feature is very useful, it would be more useful with a couple of additional configuration options for logging user acceptance and expiration. Logging options: For heavily regulated industries, this capability could be used to require acceptance or acknowledgement of risks, data sensitivity, limitations and all sorts of other things. Half of the point of doing that is to ensure the user is informed and understands the issue. The other half of it is giving the administrator an audit trail to demonstrate that the user accepted or acknowledged, and it is this second half that is missing. It would be nice when configuring the access notice, to be able to configure it to keep a log - perhaps in a hosted table service - to keep track and have an auditable trail indicating which users have accepted/acknowledged and when. It's the simplest feature service with editor tracking enabled. Obviously however, this wouldn't work for Portal's with anonymous access enabled and I think that's fine as someone without an account is unlikely to need to be audited in the first place. Its typically the authenticated users that you need to track in this way. Expiration Currently, the acceptance just writes to a cookie, which is configured to expire with the browser session. That means that if a user visits your Portal 5 times in the same day using 5 different browser sessions, they will have to acknowledge/accept 5 different times. That doesn't seem logical. We really only need them to acknowledge/accept once every n-days. So I'd offer that there needs to be a configuration option here to allow us to set the expiration to a value that meets our organizational requirements.    These two combined together would make for much more useful Access Notice capability. ... View more

Administrative Groups are new to ArcGIS Online with the June 2019 Update and they seem pretty useful. Eventually, they will make their way to ArcGIS Enterprise and they will be useful there as well. There is one feature they have however, that limits their usefulness within ArcGIS Enterprise: "Administrative groups offer an additional level of control for organizations because they prevent members from leaving the group unless they’re removed by a group owner or manager." - https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-online/administration/getting-to-know-administrative-groups-in-arcgis-online/ Dang. Group Owners and Group Managers can remove someone from an Administrative Group? So close, but this is not the type of group I'm looking for.  I need an Administrative Group that is linked to Active Directory, wherein: Membership is controlled by Active Directory Group Owners and Group Managers are unable to remove someone from the group Accounts are automatically created for new users added to a group if one does not exist for them already   What possible use could this have? How about self-managing groups based on Organizational structures?! Most Enterprises use Active Directory (AD). There is a method to the madness of AD. In most cases, the methodology is pretty simple. AD Users are organized into Units, Groups, Departments or something along those lines. With the above in place, an Administrator could: Create a new group in their Portal, let's call it the "Board of Directors" group. Set a person, let's say the "Chairman of the Board" whoever that person is, as the Group Owner Link the "Board of Directors" group to their AD group When this happens, Portal would read the AD group and create accounts for any users in the AD group that did not already exist in the Portal, and add them to the "Board of Directors" group - which would be an "Administrative Group" that they could not leave without leaving the linked AD Group, which in most cases would probably mean the departing user is no longer on the Board of Directors. When the user departs the linked AD group, they go back into the general pool of users or, if they are moved to a different AD linked Administrative Group, poof they get sucked into that Group. I call it, "Organizational Groups" because its based on Organizational Structure. Let's see this in ArcGIS 10.10 /11 whatever comes after 10.9 ... View more