About utility services

Utility services are the services that power specific functionality in your portal, for example, printing maps, locating addresses, calculating area, and finding directions. The portal comes with some default services, but you can use your own services. To learn how to configure your portal to use different utility services, see Configuring utility services.

Printing

Print services allow you to print or preview your web maps. When you click Print in the portal map viewer, the print service is used to preview and print the map. The portal's default print service only allows you to print or preview map services; you will not be able to print or preview other services, such as feature services or files.

To print or preview other service or item types, you must configure your portal to use a print service from ArcGIS Server. If you will be federating a server with your portal, it is recommended that you use that server's preconfigured print service. Alternatively, you can create your own custom print service and use that as the print service for your portal.

Geocoding

Geocode services are used to search for and locate addresses and places on a map. Portal for ArcGIS is preconfigured to use the World geocode service hosted in ArcGIS Online, which allows you to find and map a specified address or place-name.

You can also configure Portal for ArcGIS to use a geocode service through your ArcGIS Online organizational account, or even your own geocode service powered by ArcGIS for Server. This is appropriate in the following scenarios:

• You need to geocode a large number of addresses at once (batch geocoding), such as when you add a CSV file that contains addresses to your web map or when using Esri Maps for Office to map a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. To learn how to set up batch geocoding for your portal, see Configuring the portal to geocode addresses.
• You need to geocode addresses or places based on your own data.
• You do not have an Internet connection or are not allowed to rely on external geocode services for security or other reasons.

Note:

Geocode services that use address locators from version 9.3.1 and previous are not supported in Portal for ArcGIS. Geocode services from ArcGIS 10 Server can be used to locate individual places, but not for batch geocoding. Geocode services from 10.1 or later releases of ArcGIS Server are required to perform batch geocoding.

Geometry

Geometry services perform the calculations necessary to do such spatial analysis as buffering and calculating area. Portal for ArcGIS uses an ArcGIS Online geometry service by default. Alternatively, you can use the preconfigured geometry service of one of your federated servers. You can also choose to use a custom ArcGIS Server geometry service.

Routing

Route services allow you to find directions between two or more locations. Your portal's route utility service is used for the Directions functionality available in web maps.

There is no default route service in Portal for ArcGIS. If you want to get directions from the map viewer, you can either publish your own route service or use the ArcGIS.com World route service.

The ArcGIS.com World route service requires an organizational account. Since credentials are required to use this service, you must add the service (http://route.arcgis.com/arcgis/rest/services/World/Route/NAServer/Route_World) as a portal item, then you can use the item's REST URL for the portal route service. For instructions, see the section "If the service is not from a federated server and requires credentials" in Configuring utility services.

If you do not configure a route utility service, the Directions button will not be present in the portal map viewer. For set up instructions, see Configuring the portal to get directions.