Shorter term mobile worker licenses to accommodate contractors and interns

JoabelBarbieri

The current licensing model for the Field Maps app doesn't fully address our needs for short-term data collection projects. We require temporary access for third-party field crews during intensive data gathering periods (lasting a few weeks). Purchasing 50 full-year licenses for such a limited use case is cost-prohibitive.

A concurrent licensing option for Field Maps would be ideal. This would allow us to create a pool of licenses accessible by our temporary crews, maximizing license utilization and cost-efficiency.

HarryPlendl

Even if the licenses were created to be purchased for less than a year, it would become a headache for your Esri account manager and invoicing to determine which licenses are NEW and which are being renewed. The cost savings usually comes from paying maintenance on the licenses versus buying "NEW" licenses.  

Concurrent licensing would also cost more than a single use license, as they always do, and you would end up paying the premium for the license versus the maintenance on the license if you are buying licensing per project. You also need to maintain licenses for testing your mobile data collection solutions.  

Using the named user license model (managing licensing through Portal or ArcGIS Online under assigned licenses) would allow you to easily unassign and re-assign the license with the same level of effort as checking out and checking in current licensing. The privileges assigned to the end user could be a custom role configured just for this ability, the ability to assign and unassign licenses.  

Even if the crew is temporary, it wouldn't change the restriction of one license per user at any given time and when the crew is gone the same amount of effort disabling the crew's concurrent licenses would go into removing the license assigned to a named user.  If you're only doing mobile data collection a couple weeks a year you may as well just subcontract that work. If you mean your projects are short term, then just unassign the licenses at the end of the project and re-assign them. 

To maximize license efficiency, buy the license for the named users and pay maintenance (vastly cheaper) versus creating a premium priced product that offers no more functionality. To recoup ongoing costs, include the licensing cost in your job bids. 

Everyone has their specific needs and no one needs 100% access all the time. I personally wish the licensing was less confusing and there were fewer options instead of trying to meet every specific use case.