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What is the ArcGIS Enterprise portal?

The ArcGIS Enterprise portal is a component of ArcGIS Enterprise that allows you to share maps, scenes, apps, and other geographic information with other people in your organization. The front-end portal is powered by the back-end infrastructure of Portal for ArcGIS. You can customize the portal to fit your organization's look and feel.

The ArcGIS Enterprise portal brings together all of your geographic information and shares it throughout your organization. With it, you can:

  • Create, save, and share web maps and scenes.
  • Create and host web mapping apps.
  • Search for GIS content within your organization.
  • Create groups to share GIS information with colleagues.
  • Share links to GIS apps.
  • Share map and layer packages to use in ArcGIS Pro.

The ArcGIS Enterprise portal makes GIS accessible for users of all experience levels. Geographic viewers are designed for those who are just beginning with GIS, while experienced GIS users can connect to the portal from ArcGIS Pro, developer APIs, and other applications to use portal content in analysis and mapping workflows.

What do I get with the ArcGIS Enterprise portal?

The ArcGIS Enterprise portal includes the following:

  • The ArcGIS Enterprise portal website—At the front end of the portal, users sign in to search, use, and share content.

  • Map Viewer and Map Viewer Classic—These apps within the portal website allow you to view, design, and save web maps. Think of them as canvases in which you combine GIS information and services to make your own maps. You can save your maps, share them with others, and embed them in apps you create using ArcGIS Configurable Apps templates or ArcGIS Web AppBuilder.

  • ArcGIS Web AppBuilder—The portal website includes an embedded interactive app for designing and building web applications from your web maps. Applications you create with Web AppBuilder require no programming knowledge and are HTML-based, meaning they work on desktop browsers, tablets, and smartphones without needing a plugin. Web AppBuilder comes with a variety of themes you can customize and widgets that allow you to deliver advanced functionality such as high-quality printing, geoprocessing, editing, and search. To learn more, see What is ArcGIS Web AppBuilder.

  • Activity Dashboard for ArcGIS—The website includes an embedded app that reports various usage statistics for items, users, and groups. Organization administrators can use this information to monitor reports, information, and metrics detailing activities in the organization. To learn more, see About usage reports.

  • Scene Viewer—In the ArcGIS Enterprise portal, the Scene Viewer application is used for viewing 3D geospatial content. Scene Viewer works with desktop web browsers that support WebGL, a web technology standard for rendering 3D graphics.

  • ArcGIS apps—The ArcGIS Enterprise portal supports user-friendly applications that allow people to interact with web maps and scenes from your portal. For a full list of portal-ready applications, see Common clients of ArcGIS Enterprise.

  • ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World content—By default, portals are configured to access ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World content provided by Esri. ArcGIS Living Atlas content is available to portals in connected and disconnected environments; to learn more, see Configure Living Atlas content.
  • Administrator tools—The ArcGIS Enterprise portal website includes administrator tools that allow management of users, groups, and content. Only members of the portal who have administrator privileges can see these options when they sign in to the website.

  • ArcGIS Portal Directory—The ArcGIS Portal Directory is an interactive view of the ArcGIS REST API's resources for working with the portal. For example, some administrative tasks such as unregistering the ArcGIS Web Adaptor (IIS), updating the location of the portal's content directory, and setting the identity store are all available in the ArcGIS Portal Directory. To learn more, see About the ArcGIS Portal Directory.

Get started

If you are getting started with the ArcGIS Enterprise portal, review the following topics:

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