FAQ: How Can My Organisation Access ArcGIS GeoBIM Licenses?

ArcGIS GeoBIM licenses are currently an inclusion of ArcGIS Online ArcGIS Professional Standard and ArcGIS Professional Advanced user types.  You can read more on user types here.

If your organization does not have an ArcGIS Professional Standard or Advanced user type, GeoBIM can be purchased as an add-in license and then assigned to a compatible User Type, within your ArcGIS Online subscription. You can see more on how to manage licenses here.

If you would like to learn more about GeoBIM, please feel free to contact us

Which ArcGIS Online items are consuming the most credits through storage?

As your ArcGIS Online organization grows, so does the amount of content, and subsequently the credit consumption to store it. It is important for Creators to understand which types of items consume storage credits at a higher rate, and for administrators to identify which users and items are incurring the highest usage.

Getting started with credit management in ArcGIS Online

As the administrator of an ArcGIS Online organization, you have the ability to review your organization’s subscription details and credit status, manage members and licenses, monitor activity, generate usage reports and configure settings. Understanding and managing your organization’s credits may be new to you; but there is a wealth of resources available to help you navigate this task.

This article aims to provide you with a step-by-step guide of these key resources, to point you in the right direction, and ultimately get you started with managing credits in ArcGIS Online.

Getting started with ArcGIS for Student Use

You’ve purchased an ArcGIS Student license; now, how do you to use it?

This is your one-stop-shop for getting up and running with your new ArcGIS for Student Use subscription. This blog will step you through each stage of the setup process, using the following FAQs as our guide:

1. What is included in my subscription?
2. What is My Esri, and why do I need it?
3. How do I configure my My Esri permissions?
4. How do I download and install the software?
5. What is ArcGIS Online, and why do I need it?
6. How do I activate my ArcGIS Online Organization?
7. How do I assign an ArcGIS Pro license?
8. How do I use my ArcGIS Pro license?
9. How do I authorize ArcMap?
10. Where do I go for training, support, and help?

Boost your Web AppBuilder Productivity with the URL Scheme

You may have been working with ArcGIS Web AppBuilder for some time now, and mainly see it as your interactive Web AppBuilding friend. But did you know you can easily swap out your web map from the application, by simply modifying the URL?

This could you be useful to you if you were creating a web application template for users and you wanted to quickly see how your application template would look, referencing a variety of maps. Or, if you wanted to promote the use of your web application to your users, in a way that showcases a variety of web maps.

You can do this quickly using a URL scheme. The scheme essentially adds the item ID value of the applicable web map, to your existing web application URL, using a key/value pair. The key is the “webmap” property, whilst the “value” references the web map via its ID.

Important Security Alert for the ArcGIS API for Flex/ArcGIS API for Silverlight

Esri has announced that they will be removing security policy files that are used by the ArcGIS API for Flex (January 26, 2021) and the ArcGIS API for Silverlight (October 12, 2021) from ArcGIS Online. This means that Flex and Silverlight apps will no longer be able to access any content / services from ArcGIS Online. Furthermore, due to security vulnerabilities associated with running Flash, Adobe no longer supports Flash as of 12/31/2020 and is taking steps to block Flash-based apps from running altogether.  

How to use Guest accounts in your ArcGIS Online Organisation or Portal for ArcGIS

Do you have guests or temporary workers in your organisation’s ArcGIS Online or Portal for ArcGIS?

Their accounts can often see anything that is shared to the organisation. This can be undesirable.   How do you enable your organisation’s core-staff to have access to a wide range of content but have that content unavailable to these temporary users? 

If this is something that your organisation has concerns about, it’s a great time to start using Groups to divide and organise your content into sections or categories for your different types of users. This process is called Compartmentalization.

Act Now: Preparing for HTTPS Only enforced in ArcGIS Online

ArcGIS Online will enforce HTTPS Only on all organizations on December 9 2020 (AEST).
This important security update is likely to affect some ArcGIS Online organizations, their content, software and custom solutions.

Customers affected by this update who have not enabled HTTPS Only for their ArcGIS Online organizations as yet, should act now. Preparing and testing now will help avoid surprises before the policy is enforced on December 9 2020 (AEST).

Am I Affected?

HTTPS Only is a configurable setting in ArcGIS Online. It’s been enabled by default for newer subscriptions (from September 2018) and will be enforced for all organizations on December 9 2020 (AEST). The result is four categories for consideration:

Survey123 for ArcGIS: Securing surveys and results

Survey123 for ArcGIS is a complete, form-centric solution for creating, sharing and analyzing surveys. It is used to create smart forms and can be submitted from a web browser or dedicated Survey123 for ArcGIS native app by a defined audience.

Surveys can be designed on the Survey123 website or via the desktop with Survey123 Connect. Once designed, the survey is published, and in this process a survey form and service layers are created in the designer’s portal (ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise). The survey form item represents the questions and survey settings, and the survey layers storing the submitted data.

ArcGIS Online Security Changes – Is Your Organisation Prepared?

Earlier last month Esri published a blog post titled Prepare for Next Major ArcGIS Online Security Advancement Now. I have to admit when I first read it; I didn’t pause for long – thinking it was related to another recent web-security related change by Esri – the switch to TLS 1.2

If your eyes are glazing over already, hang in there. There was more to this post than I first thought, and it’s something you should be thinking about now if you’re administering an ArcGIS Online organisation that has been in place for some time. To be specific, if you created your ArcGIS Online site before September 2018, then you should read on.

What’s going to happen in 2020 is that ArcGIS Online will no longer work with external references to resources that use HTTP in the referring URL. Only HTTPS references will be supported. This is the way the web is moving and Esri is simply following best practice.

If you created your ArcGIS Online organisational after September 2018, then you will have been subject to this restriction from the get-go and won’t have a problem (it has been the default position since that time). If the organisational site is older than that, then there’s a chance you could have these less secure references to resources lurking in your web maps, web scenes and other items. If you do nothing, a bunch of things may stop working at some point in 2020, and you’ll be scurrying to try and fix them in a hurry.

For any of you utilising Story Maps you may have already encountered this. In 2018 the Story Map team implemented HTTPS only compliant web apps. This meant not only did the story map have to be secured with HTTPS but also any referenced site in a story map  also had to be secured in the same fashion. In 2020 ArcGIS Online in its entirety will follow suite. Details on that earlier Story Map change here.

How would you know you’ve got a problem to solve? Esri has created a tool called the ArcGIS Online Security Advisor that will scan all the items in your organisation, looking for the issue. You’ll need to be logged in as an administrator of the organisation to do this. The HTTP Check component of that tool is in Beta right now with new capabilities being added regularly.

It can’t directly fix the issues because a simple replacement of HTTP with HTTPS in the reference may not work  if the target server doesn’t support HTTPS. However, it will give you the feedback you need to go triage each of the problems it flags.

A typical scenario that could impact many users is where a GIS service is coming from an older version of ArcGIS Server and added as an item to an ArcGIS Online organisation. That older ArcGIS Server version would have allowed the specification of just HTTP, or both HTTP and HTTPS when exposing services.

Here’s an example. Way back, I created a web map in my ArcGIS Online organisation that refers to the Australian Coastal Sediment Compartments web service from GeoScience Australia.  The link here is for the HTTPS version (since this is all about best practice), but when I created that map, I used the HTTP version. Both forms are currently supported by the GeoScience Australia GIS Server.

The map displays the GA map service on top of the Esri Oceans basemap and works fine. Come 2020; this won’t be the case. If I use the beta HTTP Check tool in the ArcGIS Online Security Advisor, it picks up two problems with the web map.

 
In scanning the web map item, it detected that I have the URL of the GA web service in the Description. While that won’t break the map when HTTP is no longer supported, it still needs attention given the resource it refers to will change.

The second pickup by the tool was the actual URL to the GA service in the JSON data describing the web map.

Equally, if you’ve created items in your portal that refer to resources coming from external sources  – say a web service from an external agency that you collaborate with, then you may come up against the same issue if they’re using HTTP.

When you interact with a web site that doesn’t use HTTPS to encrypt traffic these days, you get to know it. It’s no longer just a small broken padlock icon – mainstream browsers are now calling it out and telling you that the site is not secure. That’s a good thing, and Esri is just doing its part to ensure web security best practices are adhered to.

Read the original blog post here and use the ArcGIS Online Security Advisor tool to determine whether you need to take any action.