Back to School. Time for EDUs to Clean and Manage their ArcGIS Online Accounts for the Classroom

No doubt, you’ve heard us discuss how important the GIS EDU community is to us, particularly for the EDU users of Admin Tools for ArcGIS Online. With a new term just around the corner for most high schools, colleges, and universities, there are lots of GIS housekeeping tasks to do to prepare for incoming classes.

Admin Tools users in EDU are avid users of the tools. Some of the top uses by the GIS EDU community include: backup and restore, viewing item dependencies, delete users, email users, manage user credits, and cloning accounts. With Admin Tools Pro, GIS educators and institutions responsible for managing many student user accounts can do so much more efficiently, with fewer headaches, and enjoy many benefits.

Dave MacLean, member of the GIS Faculty at the College of Geographical Sciences (COGS),  shared some examples and benefits of using Admin Tools which he says are particularly valuable at the start and end of school terms. Maclean comments,  “At year-end, various GEO Jobe Admin Tools are really handy in managing our users. In particular, Move Items, Update Items Owner, Delete Items, and Delete Users are particularly useful. However, we depend heavily on the Update Items Delete Protection Tools. As part of account clean-out, these tools make it very straightforward to manage whole programs of students in just a few actions. Throughout the year, Email Users is helpful to bulk e-mail only our AGOL users and to the accounts they use most often. Also, as roles need to change as the year progresses, the Update User Roles is very convenient.” There’s no doubt that Admin Tools is a huge time saver to MacLean as he manages his 200 ArcGIS Online users.

Campus GIS Lab - Image credit: COGS
Image: COGS classroom lab (credit COGS/Dave MacLean)

Performing administrative tasks within ArcGIS Online can be a little painful at times, but it doesn’t have to be. Administrators of organizations, institutions, and education facilities all over the world have adopted our Admin Tools (Pro) for a number of reasons. This helpful video provides an example of how users from the ConnectEd effort have adopted Admin Tools Pro to solve a pain point.

The users’ options for cloning include: clone entire organization, clone groups to organization, clone items to organization, clone roles to organization, clone users to organization

GEO Jobe COO, David Hansen is extremely passionate about our work with the EDU community. He comments, “GEO Jobe always tries our best to support educators in any way we can. Universities in particular were pivotal early adopters of Admin Tools, with their need for managing a high turnover rate of organization members ( students in this case ) and the need to rapidly control access to groups and software licences for these members of the organization. The feedback and guidance of our user-base is a big part of the success of our products.”

Educators are reminded that they can quickly and easily get started with Admin Tools which is available free or in a Pro version for a nominal fee (monthly or annual subscription).

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