Recently, we shared some of the TOP posts and popular topcs of discussion from our blog, these were our Top 17 blog posts from 2017. Our popular blog posts touched on such topics as GEO Education, ESRIUC, the GEOPowered Cloud, WebGIS, LiDAR, and UAV technology. But what about Admin Tools for ArcGIS Online? Admin Tools is our flagship solution for users/Admin of ArcGIS Online, offered in several options to users: Free, Pro, and for Portal (on premise) installations. There’s many reasons to consider adopting Admin Tools in your organization in 2018.

Perhaps your organization is winding down for the Christmas holiday year end. For many users this means time to clean up your organization a little, categorize your users’ {groups} teams and data, perhaps make a few hires, look at the year ahead, and do some budget planning for 2018. Admin Tools have been designed to enable the ArcGIS Admin in any organization to access and complete common tasks and workflows fast, saving time and making them more productive – no wonder over 3,500 orgs are using Admin Tools!
With this in mind, we share a detailed list of 17 reasons to adopt Admin Tools for ArcGIS Online in your organization:
- Create and manage groups – invite users to participate in groups where users share a common project or focus
- Update bookmarks – easily update, delete, create, reorder & copy bookmarks between multiple web maps keeping things clean and consistent
- Import items from JSON
- Tag, move, share, delete items – take control of managing your assets and data
- Export / Import via CSV – use Excel’s tools such as find and replace to make changes quickly to thousands of records and import those back
- Email members – an easy way to communicate with all my ArcGIS Online members
- Manage user entitlements – take control and manage what your users can access
- Update user credits and roles – as employees come, go and change positions you can control their user settings
- Delete and migrate users – keep your organization’s user accounts clean and tidy
- Update webmap urls – when you make changes or alter where web services reside you can edit accordingly here
- Cloning – clone entire organization accounts, items, groups, or roles from one ArcGIS Online account to another
- Create a model organization – using model org templates from Esri you can quickly deploy the entire model to your account
- Update user Esri Access – manage your users’ access to Geonet and manage communication settings from Esri
- Update user thumbnails – handy of your org re-brands. you can update all your users thumbnail images at once
- Migrate user settings – handy if a person replaces a key employee. Use this to migrate a user account, role, groups etc… to another user
- Copy Items – simple yet powerful, make a copy of a map, app, feature service
- Clone roles – copy custom user roles to another organization (Pro) – See video below
Now is the time to think about planning for the new year and adopting strategies that can assist your staff in managing your Org’s GIS and Geospatial assets.
“Most administrators of ArcGIS Online know that items and groups can be organized by tags, however, using Admin Tools users can also be organized by tags. You may say “I already have roles and groups to organize users”, but roles are meant for controlling actions that can be performed in the platform and groups are used for sharing content. Using tags for users allows you to tag every police officer and fire fighter as “public safety”. Then (using Admin Tools) all users of the tag “public safety” can be invited into a group that was quickly created to store data related to an event suddenly taking place such as responding to a natural or man-made emergency. After the users are invited into the group, the email users tool can be used to email all users with the “public safety” tag each time new content is added to the group. Using tags for users allows Administrators to easily recreate their real-world organizational structure in the ArcGIS platform. Imagine how easy it is to invite users to groups, delete users, email users, or do many other actions once all your users are organized using tags. “