ArcGIS Pro Version Governance

UofSC_KevinHaynes

How do you do version updates to ArcGIS Pro at your universities or Colleges? 

When do you update? Do you stay up to date with Esri Versions? Do you control what version the whole campus uses? How do you manage updating computer labs vs student laptops? 

If I have a lab still running 3.3 and I have professors teaching using 3.3, which we had planned to keep until this summer, now I have students not able to download 3.3 from my.esri using their AGOL accounts. Tech support confirmed the only way is for an admin to download it for them and give it to students OR for me to create separate my.esri accounts for students, and then they would have legacy download access. 

I badly need to sit in some sessions about GIS Governance in Higher Ed, because it really is unique from other organizations. 

PeterKnoop

Hi Kevin, I think there are a wide variety of successful ArcGIS Pro version management strategies. I believe which one might work best for a particular institution depends on what their user community looks like. So hopefully more folks will chime in with what their community looks like and what works best for them.

For our community of over 10,000 GIS users, we typically have 150-250 daily users of ArcGIS Pro, and more than 400 over the course of a typical semester. The frequent users represent a mix of students, staff, and faculty using Pro for classes, research, and administrative tasks. The other users are a similar mix using Pro for a class project or two during the term, or using Pro for a particular phase of their research or administrative work. The users are from a number of different campus units, or students from a variety of degree programs, so there is a broadly-based community that needs to be served.

With the differences between Pro 2.9 and 3.x, which version was used where, represented a major concern in terms of keeping what people wanted and what was available to them coordinated. In recent years, for the various versions of 3.x, this has not been an issue.

Our users access Pro in managed computer labs, managed virtual environments, faculty/staff labs and offices, and on a wide-variety of personally-owned machines (particularly students). In general, the managed labs and VMs are kept at a specific version of Pro during a semester to avoid changes in UX, functionality, capabilities, etc. being a source of confusion. Those environments are controlled by different IT groups across the institution; however, they strive to kept their versions synchronized each semester. The version used in such environments is usually the latest version from about 2-3 months prior to a semester beginning.

For labs and offices, people can choose whether to have their version managed or not. If they choose managed, then the version is generally the same as in the managed labs, or one of several previous versions (the use can choose the version they run.) If they choose to take care of it entirely themselves, then they can run any version they want.

Similarly, when it comes to personal machines people can choose to run what ever version of Pro they want.

For those managing their own ArcGIS Pro installations, they can access instructions and installers via the same, familiar institutional workflow they use for other such software available for personal use. The installers and instructions are typically customized for our environment. For example, they are set to use Named User licensing and our main ArcGIS Online organization as the Portal and Licensing servers.

The customized instructions also are designed to help clarify some of the common pain-points found in Esri's documentation for installing Pro. For example, directing them to the specific .NET package (i.e., .NET Desktop Runtime) they need to select from all the versions Microsoft provides on the same download page.

We do not use MyEsri for distributing ArcGIS Pro to end-users, as the overhead of managing access to MyEsri for such a large, broad user community is unrealistic.

That means our ArcGIS administrators take on the task of downloading the installers from MyEsri. Whenever there is a new version they redistribute/repackage it for access via those familiar institutional sites. Such sites are fronted by the same single-sign-on resource that determines if a user is authorized to use ArcGIS, so only those users who are authorized to use ArcGIS can get to the installation resources.