1. Add content
It's easy to share relevant, authoritative, and compelling content—maps, layers, scenes, apps, and so on—with others inside and outside your organization. The first step to sharing your content is to add it to ArcGIS Online. If you have privileges to create content, you can add items from your local machine or the web. You can also create and save items—such as maps, scenes, and apps—directly in ArcGIS Online. Many types of items can be added.
2. Refine item details
Every item in ArcGIS Online has an item details page, which contains a variety of information, actions, options, and settings. The item details help other people find your content, as well as understand its purpose, the data it contains, and whether there are restrictions on its use. To make your content stand out as compelling and authoritative, be sure to include an interesting summary, an in-depth description, and carefully considered tags, as well as to credit the source of the data. You might also consider adding a custom thumbnail to make your item stand out in galleries and search results.
3. Choose audience
Before sharing your items, identify your audience. Do you want to share your items with the public, with your organization, or with specific individuals in your organization or another organization? Until you share your items, they can only be accessed by you and by organization members with the right administrative privileges.
4. Share content
Once you've added your content as items, refined the item details, and chosen your audience, the final step is to share your items.
You can share a wide variety of item types. For example, you can share a map through an app or share your feature data as a hosted web layer that others can add to their maps and scenes. If you have authoritative data, you may want to make it available to the public using Open Data.
Depending on your sharing privileges and the security settings of your organization, you can share your items with groups you belong to, your organization, other organizations, or the public (everyone), or with a combination of these. Using groups is a powerful way to share your content privately with others inside and outside your organization, facilitate team collaboration, and highlight and organize items by theme or project. You can also use collaborations to easily share and work with content from other organizations.
Next steps
Try these quick resources to learn more about sharing content: