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Publishing in ArcGIS Enterprise

ArcGIS Enterprise supports various ways to publish data. By publishing data, you can make it available to other members of your ArcGIS Enterprise portal for use in maps and apps. The primary ways to publish content are from ArcGIS Pro and the ArcGIS Enterprise portal. You also publish content as part of workflows in the portal or in ArcGIS apps. For example, the standard feature analysis tools in Map Viewer Classic create feature layers that store the results of analysis.

As a publisher, it is important to consider the functionality you want available for your web services and layers before you publish. The necessary functionality may vary from service to service. It is also important to consider how you want people to use your services and where you want the data to be stored.

When you publish, you can copy the data to ArcGIS Enterprise—which results in hosted layers and data managed by ArcGIS—or you can reference data in its original location.

Publishing from ArcGIS Pro

ArcGIS Pro provides a full user experience and set of options for publishing. In ArcGIS Pro, you decide what functionality you want the web layer to have, and this dictates the type of layer you publish. For details on publishing web layers, see Introduction to sharing web layers in the ArcGIS Pro help.

When you publish from ArcGIS Pro, you can copy all data or reference registered data. By copying all data when you publish a feature layer, ArcGIS takes a snapshot of your data and copies it to the relational ArcGIS Data Store and creates a hosted feature layer item in the portal and a service on the portal's hosting ArcGIS Server site. When you copy all data when publishing a tile layer, ArcGIS takes a snapshot of your data and creates a cache on the portal's hosting ArcGIS Server site that populates a cached map service and a tile layer item in the portal. You can share your layer items to allow others to find and use them.

If you publish using the option to reference registered data, your data stays in place in your registered, user-managed data store, and the service and layer item in the portal reference the data in the user-managed data source. You must register your data store with your federated ArcGIS Server site to publish a layer that references registered data.

Publishing from an ArcGIS Enterprise portal

You can also publish data from the ArcGIS Enterprise portal interface. This allows you to create web layers without requiring additional ArcGIS client software. The following are some of the ways you can publish data as web layers from the portal interface:

Publishing from other applications

There are many other applications that allow you to publish data directly or that publish content as a by-product of larger workflows. These applications all create hosted feature layers. Examples of such applications include ArcGIS for Office, ArcGIS Workforce, and ArcGIS GeoPlanner. See Common clients of ArcGIS Enterprise for a list of additional apps that publish to ArcGIS Enterprise portals.

Data stores and ArcGIS Enterprise

For workflows that reference registered data, you must first register the data store with the ArcGIS Server sites that are federated with the ArcGIS Enterprise portal.

See the following help pages for more information: