2025 WA GIS Conference

The King County IT GIS Center supports thousands of GIS users across 17 different county departments. To help track Esri user licenses, understand user activity, and support the transition from ArcMap to ArcGIS Pro, the GIS Center built the GIS License Manager application. This custom application was built using some code and does neat stuff, ties into users’ Microsoft Entra ID accounts, and reports usage for individual users down to the minute.

In addition to granular reporting, the data from this application has been aggregated into a hosted table in ArcGIS Online and used to display platform usage over time in two ArcGIS Online dashboards. These insights help the GIS Center leadership, GIS managers, and users understand what platforms are in use, and what teams might need additional help transitioning from ArcMap to ArcGIS Pro.

Join us as we discuss the technical details behind building the GIS License Manager application and obtaining usage minutes from ArcMap, ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Pro, and ArcGIS Enterprise. We’ll also go into detail about the creation of the aggregated data dashboards using ArcGIS Online Dashboards, Arcade data expressions, and Experience Builder for display on our King County State of GIS Hub Site. https://state-of-gis.kingcounty.gov/pages/gislm

The Forest Practices Division of the Washington State Department of Natural Resources issue permits for forest practices on private and state forest land. Our office staff, who process permits on a tight deadline and report out stats, needed a way to quickly and easily query our Oracle database data when they had no direct access and no SQL experience. They also had no ArcGIS Online access or experience. We pursued using Power BI to create a user-friendly dashboard with user-controlled filters, but hit a brick wall when it was discovered that our agency had no budget for a data gateway. In other words, we had no way to connect our behind-the-firewall Oracle data to the cloud where Power BI could ingest it. What we did have was an SDE/ArcGIS Enterprise, allowing us to access our Oracle data in ArcGIS Portal. So, after learning a little about m-code and a lot about pagination, we were able to connect our Portal feature services to Power BI via REST API, allowing us to create custom dashboards and reports that we could then embed in Microsoft Teams for easy viewing and access for all staff members at no additional cost to our divison.