Publishing maps to your ArcGIS Server

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

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

It is required that you have ArcGIS Server 10.0 or later installed on your corporate web server. You can leverage 9.x map services but you must use ArcGIS Server 10.0 or later to host your maps.

Mobile Content Server

When you install ArcGIS 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 is 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. You will see two sources for content storage at that rest endpoint – MobileWeb and WindowsMobile.

If you are using ArcGIS on rugged Windows Mobile or Windows Tablet devices, your projects will be stored inside of the WindowsMobile folder.

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

Discovering map content and navigating folders

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

Creating maps

If 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 then upload the map to the Mobile Content Server.