Manage your ArcGIS Online organization's members

Member management can save time for administrators working with an organization of any size, but it is especially crucial for larger organizations. In this tutorial, you'll manage accounts for summer interns who are temporarily joining your organization. To quickly onboard the interns, you'll create a custom role and set new member default settings.

Using custom roles and member categories to filter members allows you to perform management tasks in a batch, such as provisioning licenses, assigning credits, and more. While both methods act as filters when searching for members, they have a few functional differences. Roles are a method of giving privileges and access to features of ArcGIS and can be customized for different users or work requirements as necessary. Member categories are a hierarchical structure that can be set up based on jobs, level of access, or other characteristics that act as a filter when searching for users.

Finally, once the interns have completed their summer with the company, you'll offboard them by disabling their accounts and deleting them.

This tutorial was last tested on April 3, 2024.

Requirements

• ArcGIS organizational account with an Administrator role (see options for software access)
• You will be completing the tutorial using your own ArcGIS Online organization. As you work through the tutorial, you will be making changes to the organization. Some changes, like the addition of new members, will be undone when you complete the tutorial. Other changes will remain including the addition of a custom role, the change to new member defaults, and the addition of a new member category.

Manage your ArcGIS Online organization's members

Configure custom roles and New Member Defaults

Your company has interns joining for the summer who will need ArcGIS Online accounts to complete their projects. To prepare for the first of several groups, you’ll configure a custom role so that the interns will have only the privileges they need to complete their work. Then, you’ll set up new member defaults to quickly add the interns to your organization. New member defaults allow you to configure settings that will automatically be applied to members joining your organization and should include permissions or licenses broadly applicable to the users you plan to add.

1. Sign in to your ArcGIS organization with your administrator account.
2. On the ribbon, click Organization and choose the Settings tab. Click the Member roles tab.

   The Member roles page appears. It lists all the roles currently available to your organization, including default roles and any that you or another administrator has configured.

   

   You’ll create a new custom role for the summer interns.

3. On the Member roles page, click Create role.

   

   The Create role window appears.

4. In the Create role window, for Name, type Summer Intern Publisher.

   You can create a role by using an existing role as a starting point or choosing a template that best matches the members' needs. The interns will be working on a variety of projects, but you want to remove the ability to create tiles.

5. In the Role privileges section, click Set from existing role.

   

6. In the window, choose Publisher and click Import settings.

   

   The privileges associated with the Publisher role are added. You can customize the role by adding or removing privileges.

7. Under General Privileges, expand Content and toggle the Publish hosted tile layers, Publish hosted tiled imagery layers, and Publish hosted dynamic imagery layers options off to disable them.
8. For Description, type or paste Modified publisher role for summer intern program.

   Caution:

   You will be completing the tutorial using your own ArcGIS Online organization. As you work through the tutorial, you will be making changes to the organization. Some changes, like the addition of new members, will be undone when you complete the tutorial. Other changes will remain including the addition of a custom role, the change to new member defaults, and the addition of a new member category.

9. Click Save to save the customized role.

   The Summer Intern Publisher custom role is now listed in the Member roles page and can be assigned to users.

   

   Roles can be assigned as you’re adding a member to the organization, or they can be assigned to members already in the organization. Next, you’ll set the new member defaults to assign the Summer Intern Publisher role and some of the licenses that the interns will need to complete their work.

10. Click New member defaults.
11. In the User type and role group, set User type to Creator and Role to Summer Intern Publisher.

    

12. For Add-on licenses, click Manage add-on licenses and select ArcGIS Pro Standard. Click Save.

    You can also choose to set Member Categories and group membership as part of New member defaults. For now, you won't assign these settings, because you’ll configure categories later in the tutorial to sort the summer interns based on their team assignments.

    Next, you’ll add the group of interns.

13. On the ribbon, click the Members tab and choose Invite members.

    

    The Add members window appears.

    To add this group of interns, you’ll use the Add members without sending invitations option, which allows you to create the accounts immediately but requires you to send the interns their credentials.

    The Add members and notify them via email option creates a new account, but it won’t be activated until the user accepts the invitation sent to them and sets up a password.

    Finally, the Invite members to join using an account of their choice option allows users to join an existing ArcGIS public account to the organization, adding their content and any other records associated with the user.

    Note:

    To use the Invite members to join using an account of their choice option, a user’s account can’t be associated with another organization, and any content that is added to the organization can’t be easily removed by the user if you choose to separate their account from the organization at a later date.

14. In the Add members window, ensure Add members without sending invitations is selected and click Next.
15. Click New members from file.

    

16. Download the member_invite_csv to your Downloads folder. Drag it to the Drag and drop or browse for a csv file (UTF-8) box or use the Browse button to upload the member_invite_csv file.

    Note:

    The member_invite_csv file is a prepopulated version of the template that you can download from the Add members from a file page. To download a blank .csv template for your own organization, click Download CSV template.

    The Review and fix pane appears, showing how each of the new members will appear in the organization.

17. Ensure the Field errors column has no errors and click Next.

    

18. In the Add-on licenses pane, ensure that ArcGIS Pro is listed. Click Next.
19. Click Add members.

    You have created and configured a custom role for the incoming summer interns, set the default privileges and licenses for this custom role, and used a .csv file to add members assigned to this role to the organization.

    Next, you will manage your organization members using categories.

Manage members with categories

In addition to custom roles, categories can be used to sort and filter organization members. While member roles are tied to access permissions, member categories are a more lightweight, hierarchical method of organizing your members.

In the previous section, you assigned your summer interns a custom role to manage their privileges in the organization. In this section, you’ll create member categories based on two teams that the interns will be working with so you can make sure they’re seeing the correct content.

1. On the ribbon, on the Members tab, click Set up member categories.

   

   Note:

   If your organization already has member categories configured, click Configure categories and click Add category below the list of existing categories.

   

   The Configure member categories window appears. Categories can be configured however makes sense to your organization, business processes, data needs, and more. In this example, you’ll create categories for the teams within your company that the interns will be working with. Categorizing the interns’ accounts will make them easier to find and process in batch for tasks such as adding them to groups, sharing content, and other tasks.

   Note:

   In this example, you’re working with five users for the sake of demonstration. Categories can be effective in organizations of any size but can make large organization management especially efficient.

2. In the Configure member categories window, in the text box, type Sustainable Planning and press Enter.

   The Sustainable Planning member category is created.

   

   You can choose to add additional categories, or to create subcategories.

3. Click the Add category button and type Ecosystem Restoration.
4. Close the Configure member categories window.

   The categories you created are added to the Categories list.

   

   Now you can assign users to the categories.

5. In the Filters pane, in the Role group, click the Summer Intern Publisher role to show users with that role and click two of the users to select them.
6. Above the members list, click Categorize.

   

   The Categorize selected members window appears.

7. In the Categorize selected members window, select the Sustainable Planning category and click Done.

   Two of the five intern accounts have been categorized by the team they’re working with.

8. Categorize the remaining three intern accounts with the Ecosystem Restoration category.

   You have created new member categories and assigned user accounts with the Summer Intern Publisher role to the new categories.

   Next, you will manage add-on licenses for your users.

Manage add-on licenses

You already gave the interns access to ArcGIS Pro when you added them to the organization. Now you’ll further customize the licenses available to them. The interns on the Sustainable Planning team will need access to the ArcGIS GeoPlanner app to complete a project.

ArcGIS Online is used to provision licenses to ArcGIS applications, including ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Business Analyst, and others. Like roles, licenses can be assigned when the user is added to the organization or changed after the user is a member.

1. On the Members tab, select the Sustainable Planning category to show the two members.
2. Select the two member accounts. Click Manage add-on licenses.

   

   The Manage add-on licenses window appears. This window shows the licenses available to the members you’ve selected and what is already assigned to them. For a more detailed view of your organization’s licenses, you can use the Licenses tab.

3. In the Manage add-on licenses window, under Applications select ArcGIS GeoPlanner and click Save.

   You have added ArcGIS GeoPlanner add-on licenses to users in the Sustainable Planning category. You can also manage licenses for individual users and for the entire organization.

Manage member content

As the administrator, you can change the ownership of content within your organization. This can be useful for moving content to an official company-branded account for external sharing, for transferring ongoing work to colleagues, and in many other cases. In this case, Intern 1’s prospective team has let you know that they’re assigning a particular project and would like to prepopulate the intern’s account with some of the content they’ll need to get started. You’ll save a map and move it to the intern’s account.

Tip:

You can also bulk reassign content to a users’ account from the Members tab.

1. On the ribbon, click the Map tab.

   A blank map opens. You’ll save the map and transfer it to the intern’s account.

2. On the Contents (dark) toolbar, click Save and open and choose Save as.

   

3. In the Save map window, for Title, type Intern Project Map.
4. For Summary, type or paste Starting map for Intern1’s project and click Save.

   The map is saved to your account.

5. On the Contents toolbar, click Map properties. In the Map properties pane, click Item details.

   

   The map’s Item page opens in a new tab.

6. On the Item page, for Owner, click Change owner.

   

7. In the Change owner window, for New item owner, search for and select Summer_Intern1. Click Save.

   

The map is now owned by Summer Intern1 and will be available for them when they sign in to their ArcGIS Online account to begin work.

Delete members

Once the interns have finished their summer internship with the company, it’s time to offboard them from the organization. For security reasons, and because you will likely want to reallocate your user type to someone else, you’ll remove the interns' accounts. If the interns had signed in to the accounts, your first step would be to disable the accounts that are no longer active until you can assess any content the interns have created. Members can’t be deleted if have licenses assigned, or own content or groups, so you’ll remove these prior to deletion. Then, you’ll remove the intern accounts from the organization to reopen the spots.

1. On the ribbon, click the Organization tab and click Members.
2. For Filters, under Role, click the Summer Intern Publisher role to show the five members.

   Tip:

   It is recommended that you disable accounts when someone no longer needs access to your organization. Disabling the account will ensure they can’t sign in to the organization to view or edit content while you decide what to do with content and groups that the account owns.

   Because you can’t disable accounts that have never been activated, you’ll move to deletion.

3. For Summer Intern 1, next to Role, click More and choose Delete member.

   

   The Delete member window appears. This window and the ones that follow, allow you to check for Esri access, transfer ownership of any content or groups that the member owns, and remove any licenses that would prevent the account from being deleted.

   First, you’ll transfer the intern’s content. You can choose anyone in your organization to receive this content, such as the intern’s mentor or others on their project team. For now, you’ll add it to your account.

4. For Before deleting this member, how would you like to manage their content and groups?, confirm Transfer content and groups is selected and click Next.
5. For Transfer, for New owner, search for and select your administrator account.

   

   Next, you’ll check for Esri access. Allowing Esri access, as you did when you created the intern account, gives the user access to some resources outside of the organization, such as Esri Training and the Esri Community.

   Note:

   If you don’t remove Esri access from the account before deleting it from your organization, the account is converted from an organizational account to a public account. While the public account won’t have any access to your organization, it is still available to use with Esri web resources such as My Esri and the Esri Community.

   If the account to be offboarded has a username that includes your company’s name or branding, consider removing Esri access prior to deletion.

6. Ensure the Keep Esri Access box is unchecked.

   

   Now you’re ready to delete the intern’s account.

7. Click Delete member.

   The Delete member dialog box appears. Depending how many items, groups, and licenses the member has, this may take some time.

   

   When the process is complete, you’ll return to the Members page.

8. Repeat the process to delete the other four intern accounts.

   Once the accounts are gone, the interns have been offboarded and you’re able to reallocate the user types.

In this tutorial, you learned strategies for adding, categorizing and deleting members.

Acknowledgements

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