Sharing and deploying mobile projects

There are a number of strategies for deploying mobile projects to your field workers. Regardless of the technology that you use, consider provisioning mobile devices that your field workers will use with as much information as possible when they are in the office. When you finish authoring mobile projects using the Mobile Project Center (MPC), you can share them with your field workers or provision their devices with mobile projects by other means.

Sharing mobile projects

You can use the Mobile Project Center to share projects to a mobile content server, which is a component of ArcGIS Server; You can also share projects to ArcGIS Online or Portal for ArcGIS. When you save a project within MPC, the operational map data and tasks, and capabilities (default and custom) are packaged together, and depending on the way you author your project, you may include basemap layers into the project as well. When you upload a project, all data that this project contains will be shared as one item (see Sharing mobile projects for more information).

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After you share a project, a local copy of it remains in your local project folder.

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Regardless of the way you share a project, take into account all possible security options that you can leverage. Consult your system administrator for more details.

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ArcGIS Online is secured using the Secure Socket Layer (SSL), which means ArcGIS Online can be identified by a digital certificate signed by a certificate authority. Before your field crew can download projects from ArcGIS Online, verify that the certificate has been installed into the Trusted Root Store of the device. If not, install it manually (one time only). For details on how to verify and install a certificate in your device, see Importing and exporting certificates.

When your device is cradled in the office or is connected via Wi-Fi or cellular network, your field crew can connect from their device to the source where you have shared your project and download projects from there. If operational map data was not packaged with the project, crew members can then use the Synchronize task in field applications to get data from the back-end (if served through ArcGIS Server) and start the field work (see Downloading projects and operational map layers for more information).

Deploying mobile projects

If your organization currently manages field devices, you might already have purchased one or more mobile device provisioning software products. If so, you can leverage an existing deployment approach to deploy your mobile projects. If you do not have a third party software provisioning system or you are doing a small number of deployments, you can directly copy your mobile projects from MPC's project folder to the field device via a desktop connection (see Deploying a mobile project for more information). Whether you use a provisioning system or desktop connections, your field crew can then connect to the mobile services to obtain operational map data if you did not package the data in your project.