Public Accounts and Organizations

[JennParrott]

I've been in the process of creating a pilot project using ArcGIS Online for data sharing I noticed that there seems to be a disconnect between public and organization accounts.

1. Can individuals with public (free) accounts join organizations (I have an organization account)?
2. Is there a way for organizations to join/share groups created by public accounts?
3. Can members join groups within the organization without being a member of the organization?

I hope these questions make sense.
Thanks

[MikeMinami]

1. Yes. They will become full members of the organization. Joining an organization allows the admin of the organization to have full control over the member's content. Thus, if the person wants to maintain personal content, they shouldn't join with their public account. Also, if they want to leave the organization, their account username is deleted.

2. No. Organizational accounts can't join groups owned by Public accounts and vice versa.

3. No. Public accounts can't join organizational groups. They can, however, see organizational groups that are public and where all content in the group is shared publicly.

thanks,

Mike

[JennParrott]

Thanks for your response Mike.

I have attempted to add an individual with a public account to my organization and the individual receives a message stating that they do not have permissions to access this resource.

How can I resolve this issue?

[MikeMinami · Accepted solution]

How are you inviting them?

From the My Organization page, you can invite users to join your organization. In this case, you'll want to let the user create their own login, because they have an existing public account. You type in their email address to send them an invitation to join.

Once the user receives the email, they click a link in the email that allows them to register their public account with your organization, effectively making it an organizational account inside your organization. It's important to note that this user is now a full member of your organization and can see any of the items shared with the organization. Thus, you can now invite them into groups so they can see items.

Inviting users into an organization is kind of a permanent thing... If a user needs to keep personal items in their account, they're better off creating a new account to join the organization--much like how people have personal and work email addresses...

Thanks,

Mike