Christian Elfers
May 23, 2013
map.apps has extended its ArcGIS Online Support with the ability to let apps authenticate against ArcGIS Online in order to be able to consume/provide protected resources from an organizational account.
What’s the business value of this? There are numerous cases where the user of an app is not necessarily also a user of the ArcGIS Online platform. Think of a large insurance company. They are running an ArcGIS Online subscription to manage claims. This is sensitive information which will be kept private and internal to the ArcGIS Online subscription, with limited access to only those employees which are also registered as named users in an ArcGIS Online account.
On the other hand, a map of claims is a very valuable information for many business areas within the insurance company. Think of a couple of hundred employees which are potential users. They don’t need to be ArcGIS Online platform users. So how do you provide access to sensitive data, kept private in ArcGIS Online, to a couple of hundred additional users that have no relation to ArcGIS Online at all?
That’s were App-Login’s come into play. A map.apps based claim viewer would securely authenticate against the ArcGIS Online subscription of the insurance company. Being authenticated, the app can access the private claims and allow users to locate, display and query them. Also, employees that use the app don’t need to authenticate at all (the app already did this on behalf of all users). In order to ensure that only employees can access the app, additional means may need to be taken. The simplest of which is to deploy the app in the internal network, but other means are also possible.
This provides a dramatic improvement of the usability of private data kept in ArcGIS Online and allows a much wider audience to participate.
The following sample demonstrates such a simple viewer. The three webmaps displayed are defined as being private for con terra’s ArcGIS Online lab subscription, and the app authenticates itself against the subscription.
Run Live App
Learn more about app-login’s for ArcGIS Online from Esri: http://developers.arcgis.com/en/authentication/