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Hybrid implementations can be useful when an organization has access to both ArcGIS Online and Portal, especially when the organization wants to provide access to contractors without having them join their corporate domain, and they have backend database scripts or other automated processing the require ArcGIS Enterprise and access to the backend SQL Server database. Hybrid implementations fall under what Esri calls “collaborations”, which are documented in https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/portal/latest/administer/windows/understand-collaborations.htm . If reviewing this document, focus on they typical hybrid implementation: Collaboration between multiple Enterprise portals with a central ArcGIS Online organization. In this scenario the ArcGIS Online organization is the ‘host’ and the ArcGIS Portal instance is the collaboration ‘participant’. When the collaboration between ArcGIS Online and Portal is established, the synchronization schedule can be established.

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• Versions

  • All ArcGIS Online users are using the same version of ArcGIS Online. This helps ensure consistent behavior for all customers that are using ArcGIS Online. When we go from the initial testing phase (using ArcGIS Online) to the implementation in Portal, there is sometimes a need to adjust configurations to account for differences between versions.

  • Issues that have been encountered have typically been related to subtle differences in the ArcGIS REST API (e.g., handling of exceededTransferLimit, default values) or error handling (more limited error messages in Portal).

• Authentication & Security

  • When using Portal, both MobileMap and InventoryManager must be ‘whitelisted’ within your web server to prevent CORS issues. You can read more about CORS here, but a good description of the problem is “client-side scripts (e.g., JavaScript) are prevented from accessing much of the Web of Linked Data due to ‘same origin’ restrictions implemented in all major Web browsers.

    While enabling such access is important for all data, it is especially important for Linked Open Data and related services; without this, our data simply is not open to all clients.“ Each web server (e.g., IIS, nginx, Apache) will have a different approach to enabling CORS and whitelisting domains, and may require support from IT or someone who manages the customer’s web servers. IIS is the most common web server for Portal users and brief instructions for enabling CORS in IIS 10 can be found here.

  • When using Portal, both MobileMap and InventoryManager must be whitelisted with Portal to enable authentication via OAuth2.0. While this process is described in detail above, it does mean an extra step in configuring MobileMap and InventoryManager and requires admin privileges within Portal.

  • Ensure support for tokens and refresh tokens. We have seen some cases where users can sign-in as expected but can’t refresh their access tokens. Typically, this has been when the internet server is blocking calls to the refresh token service. The result is that their InventoryManager session only lasts for the length of their token, typically 30 minutes.

  • Security certificates - we have seen cases where a customer’s security certificate (SSL cert) on their ArcGIS Portal instance has timed out, or otherwise been deemed to be insecure. When this happens, MobileMap and InventoryManager will refuse transfer of data since all data are encrypted and thus cannot be sent if the server security cannot be validated

  • Multifactor Authentication (MFA) - we have seen cases where MFA has caused problems with authentication in MobileMap or InventoryManager. In one example, if a user failed to complete the MFA process on the first attempt (e.g., didn’t approve the sign-in on their cell phone) they were locked out of signing in to MobileMap for some period of time. This has to do with the way that the MFA is configured and cannot be controlled within MobileMap or InventoryManager.

• Performance

  • ArcGIS Online provides sufficient performance for using very large datasets in MobileMap or InventoryManager. It is a highly scalable cloud-hosted SaaS solution built on best-in-class server and networking hardware.

  • Each Portal implementation is unique, and the performance is determined by a wide range of factors including the capabilities of the database server(s), web server(s), load balancer(s), network equipment, etc. ArcGIS settings including the maximum RAM and number of threads can have significant impact on performance. Other factors such as the database RDBMS that is used, database parameters such as block size, database compression, database triggers, etc. may impede performance. It can be hard to predict the performance of Portal prior to testing, but several customers have been surprised to see a significant drop in performance when transitioning from ArcGIS Online to Portal.

• Database Technology (RDBMS)

  • MS SQL Server is the only RDBMS that is currently supported with our system.

  • Oracle is not supported (but has never been tested) with our system.

  • PostgreSQL is not supported. The ‘default data store’ in Portal is PostgreSQL which is not currently supported due to an issue that prevents explicit control over table and field name capitalization. Esri documentation on PostgreSQL can be found here: https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/portal/latest/use/data-store-items.htm . Info on the mixed case limitation can be found here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43111996/why-postgresql-does-not-like-uppercase-table-names and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20878932/are-postgresql-column-names-case-sensitive

• Bugs

  • As of mid-November, 2023 Esri has logged at least 2 bugs with ArcGIS Enterprise (Portal) in which Editor Tracking does not update the last_edited_date or last_edited_user when features are updated. This can result in situations where MobileMap is unable to download updated feature data, because MobileMap does not see these data as modified (because their last_edited_date or last_edited_user fields did not update). While we cannot post details on these bugs here, we may be able to provide some additional details to Portal users upon request. This issue may be dependent on specific version(s) of ArcGIS Enterprise and/or the RDBMS used, but we don’t have those details at thist ime. The issue has not been reported for ArcGIS Online to the best of our knowledge.

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