ArcGIS Workforce is a powerful mobile solution that improves the planning and coordination of your mobile workforce using a location-based approach for managing field work. Included with your ArcGIS organization, Workforce combines the location of mobile workers and the tasks they need to accomplish with the maps and apps used to complete their daily activities.

Background Synchronization

With the May 2022 release of ArcGIS Workforce, we’ve added background synchronization for assignments and worker location. Historically, mobile workers would only receive and send updates when the Workforce mobile app was running in the foreground. Now, if you are actively using another application or if your screen saver comes on, Workforce will send and receive assignment changes and location updates even if the app is in the background.

Some sync considerations:

• Background synchronization only happens when the mobile user has their status set to Working.
• By default, Workforce will sync every 15 minutes (whether in the foreground or background).
• If 15 minutes is too long to wait, you can either manually sync in the app to see changes or you can bump the sync interval to 60 seconds by:
  • Setting a layer refresh interval on the Assignments layer
  • Disabling battery optimization if turned on (default setting is off)

For complete details on how synchronization works, please read our documentation topic titled Sync your work.

We’ve addressed a number of strategic bug fixes with the 22.1.0 release as well. Please review our what’s new documentation for complete information on what has updated in this release and previous releases.

What’s next

The development team for ArcGIS Workforce is the same development team that brings you ArcGIS Field Maps. Right now we are busy working on new capabilities within Field Maps for our release in June.We are planning to bring the capabilities of ArcGIS Workforce to Field Maps so that you can plan and coordinate work in the same application you use to complete it.

If you are using ArcGIS Workforce today, we’d like to understand what’s most important to you as we bring these capabilities forward. Please send us an email to ArcGISWorkforce@esri.com so that we can connect with you.