Collaborative Approach in ArcGIS Experience Builder

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01-24-2024 01:59 AM
ElieRizk
Occasional Contributor

I would like to know how teams within an organization can successfully collaborate on the same project development within the ArcGIS Experience Builder (enterprise)

Whether it's best practices, tips, or personal experiences, I'd love to hear how you and your team have navigated this collaborative journey.

such as : 

  1. How do you manage simultaneous contributions from team members within Experience Builder?
  2. Are there specific strategies you use to maintain consistency across different sections of the project?
  3. Any recommendations for version control or collaborative workflows?

Thanks,

3 Replies
RoshdKhatib
New Contributor II

I've been facing a challenge in achieving seamless collaboration within Experience Builder, and it seems this case might not be straightforward.

Here are the specific issues I've encountered:

  1. Simultaneous Contributions: Managing simultaneous contributions from team members has been quite challenging. Experience Builder doesn't seem to provide a native mechanism for concurrent editing or real-time collaboration. This lack of functionality makes it difficult to synchronize changes made by different team members working on the same project.
  2. Consistency Across Sections: Maintaining consistency across different sections of the project is another pain point. Without a robust version control system or collaborative workflows, it's easy for discrepancies to arise, leading to confusion and potential errors in the final project.
  3. Version Control and Collaborative Workflows: Unfortunately, I haven't found built-in features for version control or collaborative workflows within Experience Builder. This absence makes it challenging to track changes, revert to previous versions, or establish a structured workflow that ensures the smooth collaboration of team members.
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JeffreyThompson2
MVP Regular Contributor

I agree with @RoshdKhatib Experience Builder is not designed for multiple authors.

But to add on, you can use Themes to at least enforce a consistent appearance. If you are working on a multi-page application with different authors working different pages, you can use Headers and Footers that should be consistent across all pages.

Depending on your application, you could make heavy use of the Embed Widget. For example, if need a Storymap for one page and a Dashboard for another. There is no reason why one author couldn't  be working on the Storymap while another worked on the Dashboard and a third was working in Experience Builder.

Personally, I use Developer Edition and have a git repo set up for all of my projects, but I am developing alone and use git more as a file backup system than version control. I would not recommend allowing multiple authors to work simultaneously in Experience Builder even with git.

GIS Developer
City of Arlington, Texas
MichaelGaigg
Esri Contributor

Here are my suggestions: 

- Have a plan before you start, ideally some form of wireframes or mockups that have been agreed upon and are well thought out. This limits the time people spend on the actual document.

- That sounds silly, but assign timeslots, e.g. On Monday, Mike will get the header, pages, and layouts in, on Tuesday, Kevin will hook up the data, lists, search and filter. Once this is done, Mike can go in and adjust colors, alignments, dimensions and refine; Once that's done, Kevin will work on mobile responsiveness

- Clone the experience, work in parallel, the take the best pieces (or whatever we were able to figure out) back into master copy. This is either a replica of the work or using copy paste of the json in ago-assistant