Publishing maps to ArcGIS for Server

The ArcGIS application works with maps. Using the ArcGIS application, you can discover and open maps that are hosted on ArcGIS Online. Using the ArcGIS.com web site, you can create your own maps and share them with others, either privately within your organization or with everyone that visits ArcGIS Online. These maps can be viewed in the ArcGIS application. The maps can include map layers published openly to the web or services that are published to your own secure on-premise ArcGIS for Server.

For some organizations, however, hosting maps on the ArcGIS.com web site is not a viable option. Due to privacy concerns, you may want to open and use maps within the confines of your corporate intranet and leverage the virtual private network (VPN) capabilities of your smartphone device.

To publish maps to an ArcGIS server, you must have ArcGIS for Server 10.0 or later installed on your corporate web server. You can leverage ArcGIS 9.x map services, but you must use ArcGIS for Server 10.0 or later to host your maps.

Mobile content server

When you install ArcGIS for Server on your web server, the install includes an on-premise "mobile content server" that is a repository for the maps you can open on your smartphone device. It's the same content server used to store Windows Mobile projects for deployment to rugged mobile devices.

The default location of the rest endpoint of the mobile content server can be found at http://<server-name>/<arcgis-instance>/mobile/content. There are two sources for content storage at that rest endpoint: MobileWeb and WindowsMobile.

If you're using ArcGIS on rugged Windows Mobile or Windows Tablet devices, your projects will be stored in the WindowsMobile folder.

MobileWeb is the root folder location for storing maps used in the ArcGIS application on your smartphone device.

Discovering map content and navigating folders

Click MobileWeb to navigate to the Maps folder and discover content stored in your on-premise ArcGIS server. Here you will see a list of folders. By default, there is one folder called Maps that was created when you installed ArcGIS for Server. If you're going to create and host a large number of maps from your content server, you can create additional folders by clicking the Create Folder link found as a Supported Operation directly beneath the list of folders.

Creating maps

When you click on the Maps folder, you can create and upload your own maps to the server using the Supported Operation link titled Add Item.

To add a map, you need to understand the map format, compose the map, and upload the map to the mobile content server.