ArcGIS Online won't connect from ArcMap or Catalog

Question

I've had 10.3 installed now for about a month. At the beginning everything seemed to work fine but somewhere along the way my connection to ArcGIS Online went away and hasn't been back. The options to "Sign In", "Add Basemap", and "Add Data from ArcGIS Online" are all grayed out. There are several threads addressing these issues with answers that do not seem to be working for me.

ArcGIS Online and Sign In options are greyed out in ArcMap 10.2.2

How does ArcMap decide ArcGIS Online and Basemaps are not reachable?

Both of these threads concern earlier versions than 10.3 but the approaches seem to be the same. I have tried all of the recommended procedures to fix this and have been on the phone several times with tech support at Esri.

Here are some of the things we have already tried.

1. I've ran the "test connection" and "run connection test" dialogues and have set the properties for the system tray icon to all 3 settings.
2. Deleted the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ESRI\ArcGIS Online registry key and the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ESRI\ArcGIS Connection registry key.
3. I set all the variations of the proxy settings and auto detect settings in IE, made it my default browser and upgraded to IE 11.
4. I uninstalled and re installed ArcGIS.
5. I have signed in and out of ArcGIS Online via web browser several times with both Chrome and IE.
6. My IT department white-listed a list of URLs sent by Esri support in order to eliminate any firewall type issues.
7. My IT dept. has also monitored outgoing requests across our network to watch for traffic from ArcGIS.com. They see the connection tests but nothing when I load ArcMap or ArcCat.

Answer 1

After several days of interaction with ESRI tech support it turns out that the issue stemmed from having setup an organizational account with ArcGIS online after already logging in at one point with a personal account. Because the organization was not setup at the same time as the first initial install, I had only the default portal connection (www.arcgis.com) setup in the ArcGIS Administrator App.

The fix was...

• Load the ArcGIS Administrator app
• Click the "Advanced" button
• Click "Manage Portal Connections"
• Add our personal organizational account domain to the list of connections.

The list now contains both the default "http://www.arcgis.com" and our organizational domain "https://www.xxxxxxx.maps.arcgis.com"

This seems like such a simple problem in hind-sight... It's hard to believe it took this long to resolve.

I've noticed now that it seems that ArcGIS Online doesn't like named user accounts to switch on a single install which makes total sense. My situation was a result of my company using ArcGIS for years but having never setup an organizational account until recently.

Answer 2

One of our users (Adam Sailer [email protected]) had the same problem and solved this way:

I've figured out the solution. I needed to make sure that the 'WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Service' on Windows 10 has the StartType set to 'Automatic'.

If anyone else encounters this issue, we now have it documented.

Name                : WinHttpAutoProxySvc
RequiredServices    : {Dhcp}
CanPauseAndContinue : False
CanShutdown         : False
CanStop             : True
DisplayName         : WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Service
DependentServices   : {iphlpsvc, NcaSvc}
MachineName         : .
ServiceName         : WinHttpAutoProxySvc
ServicesDependedOn  : {Dhcp}
ServiceHandle       : SafeServiceHandle
Status              : Running
ServiceType         : Win32OwnProcess, Win32ShareProcess
StartType           : Automatic
Site                :
Container           :

Answer 3

In addition to switching the organizational domain from standard arcgis.com, I had an additional step of adding *.arcgis.com to trusted sites in Internet Explorer to be able to the see pop up window for navigating AGOL/signing in from ArcMap.