Admin Tools for ArcGIS has been a top application in the ArcGIS Marketplace for several years – and for good reason. There are many reasons why ArcGIS administrators in organizations all over the world have turned to Admin Tools in order to be more efficient in their job. If we had to focus on one area that most, if not all, users benefit tremendously, that would be to assist with the management of groups.
Why Groups?
Groups are a powerful resource for ArcGIS users and their organizations. There are all kinds of groups. They can be made up of users from a common organization, or be a public group who share a common interest and need for collaboration. Creating groups for use in ArcGIS Online can be somewhat tedious; however, it doesn’t have to be. Admin Tools for ArGIS has a set of tools that are designed specifically for the creation and management of groups and group properties. Using these tools, you can create and manage users, then group them by department, project, job description, and more.
Creating Groups
Admin Tools has a “Create Groups” Tool to make this process fast and simple. When a group is created, the administrator provides all the required information including, thumbnail, name, description, tags, user access, and more. Once created, groups can be restricted to your organization, made private, or shared with the public.
Copy Groups
Creating new groups from an existing group of users is quickly accomplished using the Admin Tools Copy Groups Tool. Create a name for each new group you’re copying. Select ‘Invite Previous Users’ if you wish to have the members of the group you’re copying added to the new group. When the group is created, you will then establish the group name, owner, and optionally invite previous users and share previous items (data). This is an extremely handy way to create multiple groups, a very common scenario.
Groups and Tags
Applying tags in bulk is a very handy and popular function in Admin Tools. In order to facilitate users in your organization searching groups and group assets, you’ll want to use tags. By adding tags to your groups, you will be able to attach additional metadata to groups in order to identify sub-groups. For example, you may have a group of employees that support your engineering department. Within that group, however, it may be useful to tag members as “technicians”, “developers”, “engineers”, etc… Tags could be quite useful for this purpose.
Add Entitlements to Groups
Once you have created a group of users, you can add entitlements to everyone in the group. For example, you may have a group working on UAV or drone mapping projects. Using the Add Entitlements Tool in Admin Tools for ArcGIS, you can quickly assign access to an application license, such as Drone2Map or 3D Analyst, to a specific person or everyone in the group.
Export Group Information
A powerful function of Admin Tools is the ability to export via CSV. Exporting information to CSV can be very useful for administrators of ArcGIS Online organizations who have hundreds or even thousands of groups and users and need the ability to filter this information by certain attributes, export that information to CSV (or JSON), and use it for auditing purposes.
Communicating with Groups
Admin Tools supports the ability to quickly contact, via email, all the users within your organization. Additionally, you can limit communications to be only users in certain groups. We have you covered here. Identify the group in question and use the contact users tool to distribute a message only to members of that specific group – too easy!
Custom Thumbnails
Groups within your organization will also benefit from the thumbnail creation tool. This is a perfect way for your groups to easily differentiate their content from others by branding maps and apps created by the group with a unique look and feel. Best of all, like many of the tools, the create thumbnail tool can be applied in bulk. This means a group can quickly and easily apply a custom thumbnail to all the content they manage. We highly suggest the use of custom thumbnails and share detailed instructions in this article.
Getting Started
We’ve covered a number of useful ways to use and manage groups using Admin Tools for ArcGIS. You can get started immediately with the free Admin Tools suite and select the Group Tools icon (see image below). Experienced users who are in need of additional support are encouraged to consult our growing Knowledge Base! There are many reasons to consider adopting Admin Tools in your organization, and, best of all, it takes only 2 minutes to access from the Marketplace and get up and running!
More useful articles:
