Teaching GIS means making sure the instructor has all the available tools and information to do their job, as well as the time to effectively do so. That time should be dedicated to planning and assisting students with coursework, not digging around content and time-intensive workflows. GEO Jobe’s philosophy is “The Power of GIS, Simplified.” With Admin Tools and Clean My Org for ArcGIS, instructors won’t be worried about all the big question marks they may have when it comes to managing their ArcGIS content and students. Below are some of what we believe are the best time savers between our two applications for educators:
In ArcGIS Enterprise and Online there are user roles and user-types, but how do you get even finer classification and categorization of your users? With tags! Admin Tools allows the administrator to add any tags they wish to users. A strong tagging library will make access to your users, and bulk operations, across other administrative tools much more streamlined! Do you want to invite all students on Monday and Wednesday afternoon classes to a particular group? If the users are tagged as such, that can be done all at once!
Enable / Disable User Login (Admin Tools)
If you have 30 or more students in any one particular class and you need to enable or disable logins for these students, do you want to do so one at a time? How long would that take you? How frequently would you be pulled away or distracted with something else that needs your attention? Get it all done in one operation with Admin Tools! Simply filter and select all the users you want to apply the changes to, and simply pick “Enable” or “Disable,” confirm, and you’re all done!
View Item Dependencies (Admin Tools)
Content across an ArcGIS Organization can feel like a spider web when it comes to knowing what web maps and apps are consuming which services. Generally, you never really know if deleting one of your services will impact someone else’s content. Fortunately, the “View Item Dependencies” feature can shed some light on exactly what is being consumed (and by what) within the Organization.
Clone Content (Admin Tools)
Did you know that in some situations, students are legally allowed access to their graded work after they graduate? What do you do when a student has graded work in an ArcGIS Organization and wants access to it after they leave school? Cloning, and in particular “Clone to Developer Account” allows you to migrate content and comply with students’ access to their work. A student can sign up for a FREE ArcGIS Developer subscription, here.
Scan Users Who Haven’t Logged In (Clean My Org)
We understand that in day-to-day administration, many students can come and go (and everything in-between). Each semester, there can be users who fall through the cracks, and end up never getting addressed or even removed. With Clean My Org, you have the option of regularly scanning for any and all users who may not have signed in to ArcGIS in a configurable amount of days. And of course, you can white-list any users that need to be omitted from the results in future scans.
Check for Broken Content (Clean My Org)
Things can go awry in so many different ways when it comes to ArcGIS Items, such as services, web maps, and layers. Frankly, it’s completely unreasonable to expect anyone to dig through all that content, one at a time, and verify that everything is connected and working properly (especially on a regular basis!). That’s why we have the “Broken Items” scans in Clean My Org! Once your scan is complete and you begin looking through the results, you can make corrective actions to that broken content directly, send a message regarding these items to the student or instructor, or remove it altogether.
Check for Orphaned Content (Clean My Org)
When classes are full of students who are all practicing at the same time to create and use various web maps and web applications, it’s quite easy as an ArcGIS Administrator to be inundated with items that just aren’t being used or assigned by anything. This can clutter and bloat your organization very quickly, especially in an academic environment. Keep your Organization tidy by making sure orphaned items don’t creep up and become a problem, later.
Check for Completeness Score (Clean My Org)
Best practices should be established as early as possible! ArcGIS has a completeness score to help show item information completeness based upon the inclusion of item snippet, thumbnail, description, title, tags etc. To be able to regularly scan all content to make sure students are adhering to best practices for their items is a big time-saver and very important for developing good habits! Clean My Org can keep tabs on all items’ completeness score and provide a report if it drops below a certain (configurable) percentage.
Add/Remove Entitlements to Users (Admin Tools)
Throughout their course work, students are going to need access to special entitlements, such as 3D Analyst. Don’t waste time turning on and off various entitlements throughout the semester. With Admin Tools, this can be done in single action across as many students as your licenses permit. This tool even allows for turning on or off all entitlements in bulk, regardless if users already do or do not have access.
Delete Users Efficiently (Admin Tools)
Deleting an ArcGIS Organization’s users can be very time-consuming, especially if they still have content. With Admin Tools, you can (within the delete operation) choose to delete all the users content, or update the ownership to another user. This is great when you need to clear out students in bulk while simultaneously moving the items to a more permanent folder for long-term access.
These solutions should absolutely allow educators to focus their time with students and assignments, and not repetitive or time-consuming administrative tasks. However, these are just a few of a much larger variety of tools and scans available from Admin Tools and Clean My Org. If you have any questions about what you’ve read, or would like to know more, please feel free to reach out at connect@geo-jobe.com.
