Spatial Analyst Floater Experience?

Question

I work at a small company determining software needs for budgeting. We're considering purchasing a spatial analyst floating license for three engineering staff. Does anyone have experience with doing this? If so, how did it work out, and what would you do differently?

Jader · Answer

Thanks for the reply! We are water resource engineers and we do a lot of surface water design - so the Hydrology Tools are critical for design and feasibility calcs. SA is also critical for raster clipping - especially when creating curve number grids and manning's roughness grids clipped to a watershed for HEC-RAS RasMapper modeling and import. Another application would be using the ArcGIS Connector in Autodesk's Civil 3D software. We are all located in one office.

BarryNorthey · Answer

We used floating licenses successfully with over a hundred users spread out over a large geographical area.
We got a better idea of concurrent license demand over time and adjusted the pool accordingly.
I had to become the "license police" to get things somewhat under control.
The biggest problem was that most users simply "forgot" to release a license once done with it.
Others insisted that they couldn't risk releasing one due to mission critical needs in emergency management.
Others insisted that the employer needed to bite the bullet and ensure that they had a license.

How mission critical is SA?
How much does down time cost vs a SA license?
Training, awareness and diligence are keys.
Also, I would suggest that you setup a backup (roll over) license manager server if possible. Saved our bacon a couple of times.

ryanuthoff · Answer

We've used floating licenses in the past so I can provide a little insight.

The biggest hurdle you will have to jump through is that only one person will be able to use the floating license at a time. That might not be a problem for your company, but any other people who need to use the floating license will have to wait until the first person is done with the license and released it back.

You'll also need to make sure those who use floating licenses don't unnecessarily occupy the license, such as accidentally leaving Pro open all day, etc.

Other than that, we haven't had any issues with using floating licenses.