Does this give you any ideas for your own app? A few years ago, I helped an EAST student demonstrate how much more damage might have occurred from the EF4 tornado that hit Vilonia if it had instead been a few miles further east, in a much more populated area. It was a useful project that made an impression on local officials and emergency managers.

Thanks to some legwork by Jerry Prince at EAST and Charlie Fitzpatrick at Esri, I can share the cure for this malady. The bottom line is that Esri has been making some changes in the “User Types” used by their system, and they’re pushing all of their accounts to change from a User Type of “Creator” to one of “GIS Professional Advanced” (sounds fancy, doesn’t it?). The only “gotcha” is that you may have to do this for many users, so I’ll show you the easy way to do that.

After signing into ArcGIS Online, make sure that you are on the “Organization” tab, and then click on “Members” in the blue bar.

If you have more than 20 members in your organization, you’ll note that this page only shows 20 members at a time by default. Thankfully, if you’re like me and have a lot of members, you can go to the bottom of the page and tell it to display up to 100 members per page:

Go back up to the top of the page and check the checkbox next to “Member” at the very top of the list to select all members on the page. If your account is also displayed on this page, you’ll need to uncheck the box next to it, as you can’t manage it at the same time as everyone else (you’ll repeat these steps just for your account). Above the list, several options will appear; you want to click on the option to “Manage User Types”:

In the “Manage user type / role” window, click on the arrows to the right of “User types assigned”:

Click on “GIS Professional Advanced”. You might also want to Roles assigned; you probably want everyone except you to be a “Publisher”, so you can take care of that at the same time if you wish. Finally, click the “Save” button. You’ll be prompted to confirm that you really want to update the User/Role of you members; you will of course click “OK”:

You’ll be returned to your Members list, where you should see that everyone now has a User Type of “GIS Professional Advanced”, except possibly yourself (you’ll fix that in a minute).

Before selecting another page of members (if you’ve got more than 100) or fixing your account, you should take this opportunity to manage add-on licenses for everyone. While all the members are still selected, click the option at the top of the list to “Manage add-on licenses”:

Because you’ve got enough licenses for all your members to have every license, I recommend saving yourself some effort in the future by simply granting every license to everyone. This includes the extensions for ArcGIS Pro, the ArcGIS Urban Suite app bundle, and all the other Applications – just select them all, then click the “Save” button at the bottom:

There is the possibility that you’ll see an Add-on License that shows (in red) that you’ve got more licenses in use than are available – this means that that particular app license is no longer part of the Education bundle. I ran into this with CityEngine, which previously was a separate license. Now it’s part of the ArcGIS Urban Suite. Regardless, if you see such an issue in your account, you’ll need to remove those licenses from the members to which they were assigned, else you’ll keep seeing that same warning box when you sign in!

That’s the basic process. Don’t forget to go back and assign the correct User Type and Add-On Licenses for yourself. If you’ve got more than 100 members, you can then go to the next page and repeat the process. Either way, it won’t take you long once you get used to it.

Feel free to contact me if you have questions or problems.

-Malcolm Williamson

Ever wanted to get a glimpse of what your town or school looked like some years ago? If you search for something like “historic imagery” in ArcGIS Online, you won’t find many useful results. Sure, they were taking aerial photos as far back as World War I – 100 years ago! – but all these photos were on film, not digital media. Scanning these photos and then aligning them properly on the Earth was a lot of work, and therefore expensive.

In the last few years, computing power has vastly increased, and software has been created that can automate much of this process. Because of this, your friends at CAST have been able to collaborate with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Arkansas GIS Office to convert 4500 scanned photos, flown over Arkansas in the early 1980s, into a seamless set of georeferenced digital images. Through the Arkansas GIS Office, anyone can now access these images directly in their GIS project.

Using these images couldn’t be easier. Simply copy the link below, and then use the Add > Add Layer from Web option to add it to the Map Viewer of ArcGIS Online.

https://gis.arkansas.gov/arcgis/rest/services/ImageServices/IMAGERY_NHAP_1980_1986/ImageServer

I’ve put together a detailed handout that walks you through the process of downloading free data from The New York Times, filtering it for your state, uploading it to ArcGIS Online, and creating a Time-Aware app, like the one above, that you can share with your class or the entire world!

You’ll find the tutorial right here. If you have any questions or problems, please contact me at mdw05@uark.edu . I hope you find it useful!