Building web maps with your organization's data for mobile devices

Mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets are enabling everyone to use maps where it matters the most, out on the road and in the field. Wherever you are, you have access to detailed and accurate maps with your organization's data without the need to unfold a paper map.

With a web map on a mobile device, you can pinpoint your location, search for a location by an address, find a route to your destination, get detailed information about your assets, and collect data in the field that is instantly synchronized with your enterprise geodatabase.

ArcGIS for mobile operating systems such as iOS, Android, and Windows Phone gives you the capability of combining your own map data with high-quality base maps, as well as adding tasks such as searching for features.

To build web maps that work well on mobile devices, you just need to follow a few steps and apply some best practices to optimize your GIS data and maps for use on a smart phone or tablet device. The process of sending your organization's data to smart phones and tables can be summarized in four main steps:

• Prepare GIS data. To serve your organization's data to ArcGIS on mobile devices, you will need GIS data in an ArcSDE geodatabase. Your organization probably has one or more geodatabases for editing and analysis. While you can adapt your existing enterprise geodatabase to serve geographic data to mobile devices, it is better in many situations to create a separate ArcSDE geodatabase that is fully optimized for serving data to web maps.
• Author maps. You will create a map document in ArcGIS for Desktop for every layer in the web map used by ArcGIS for mobile devices. The content in the map document is designed for mobile use; displaying symbology that is easy to view in the field and presenting exactly the information that your mobile workers need to access or update.
• Publish map services. Once your map documents in ArcGIS for Desktop are ready, you will publish the maps as services in ArcGIS for Server. If you want to display and query features, you would publish the map to ArcGIS for Server as a map service. If you want to edit features in the field, then you would publish the map to ArcGIS for Server as a feature service. You will use feature templates to control how features get created and what symbology is applied.
• Build and share web maps. Web maps are comprised of a basemap layer and one or more operational layers, as well as tasks with which you can add functionality such as finding features. There are two easy ways to build a web map; the map viewer in the ArcGIS web site or ArcGIS Explorer Online. Once you've built your web map, you can be share it with anyone or just the users that you authorize through user groups on the ArcGIS web site. Some organizations have a requirement that their web maps to be served strictly within a corporate intranet. In this case, you will use Portal for ArcGIS to build web maps in a private environment and deliver them securely through the VPN capabilities of your mobile device.

ArcGIS for smart phones and tablets works best with web maps that are designed for mobile use.