Hey all! We have have historically used both ArcGIS Online and Enterprise Portal, and are in the process of streamlining where our content lives moving forward. I’d like to delineate business critical and internal-only content to Enterprise and only publish public-facing content to AGO, but would love to hear from other folks about how your organization leverages the two environments.
Thanks in advance!
Hi, Sara! This is a great question, and one that I would love to hear others’ responses to as well. As of 2026, we no longer use AGOL at all, because we wanted to consolidate our user licenses to one environment. I can tell you how things were before, though.
The way we used to use AGOL was as a sort of testing / preview environment. Since AGOL gets various changes and improvements first, we could explore new capabilities in Dashboards, web maps, Instant Apps, things like that. This helped us to evaluate our Enterprise update schedule.
Years back when Data Expressions were introduced to Dashboards, for example. That was such a key improvement that we moved up our update to take advantage of it sooner. It also gave us a way to test-drive and configure apps and arcade expressions ahead of time, so that post-upgrade, we could copy and paste the code as soon as things were up and running.
Josh, thank you so much for sharing your experience from the before times! Is there anything in AGO that you miss or had to create a workaround for in Enterprise?
I don’t know that there’s much from AGO that I particularly miss, except maybe having easy, browser-based access to a Jupyter Notebook. We couldn’t really justify running a Notebook server in Enterprise.
I hear you on that! I appreciate your perspective. I’ll keep you looped in on what we decide to do moving forward!