ArcGIS Pro Concurrent licensing retiring

[GISWT]

We are hoping to expand the usage and licenses of ArcGIS Pro within our organisation but have been told that we cannot purchase Concurrent licenses as they are being depreciated and our only option is named user. We are a small organisation with only 2 core GIS users and many adhoc users, when they need to use ArcGIS it is for short-term projects and tasks, often with quick turnaround. It is not viable for us to buy licenses for all of these users but having to manually assign licenses as and when a user needs one also creates a major blocker for us in the system (what if the admins are unavailable, which is highly likely).

Has anyone else come up against this issue and been forced down the named user path? How are you managing the situation? I can't find any documentation or Esri communication about this change and can imagine many more companies will have similar difficulties. The only thing I can find is it almost happened in 2016 but in 2017 Esri back tracked because of user discontent.

[ChelseaRozek]

That's the first I've heard that we would be version locked at the last version of Pro that was available when ArcMap reaches its end of life, or maybe I just didn't understand the ramifications of any previous communication. Whatever the truth is, ESRI definitely needs to make more and clearer communication about what's going to happen.

[DavidBollinger]

  Existing concurrent licenses could fail (ie be unable support latest release of Pro) sooner than 2026.  The "10.1 - 10.8" block of ArcMap concurrent license that also licenses up to latest (currently 3.3) Pro may only go so far, and is the last version of Desktop license that we'll see.  (just as the prior license block for 10.0 only went "so far" (edited, bc version correlation may have been wrong, but those details aren't important))

  For example, upon the release of "Pro 4.0" (could be even earlier, whatever version cut-off they choose) it seems reasonable to expect that ALL former "you get Pro with Desktop" licensing would fail - because there's no more Desktop concurrent licensing AT ALL* as of 7/1/2024 (e.g. don't expect a "Desktop 10.9" license that includes "Pro 4.0").  I get that, we all know Desktop is going away, and has been expected, but they're closing doors on existing licenses in other ways sooner than expected.

  *That also means existing licenses can't be upgraded either - which is how I learned about all of this in the first place, while attempting to upgrade a Desktop+Pro from basic to advanced.  I did literally ask regarding a supposedly "grandfathered" concurrent license, and was told that the ONLY WAY forward was to acquire a Prof+ named license.

[MJB]

Someone goofed because my county engineering office just received our renewal quote and it still includes  the concurrent use licenses we've been rolling with for a while. I reached out to our account manager, something doesn't seem right...

[mthompson]

We have maybe a dozen or so folks who only use desktop GIS software to make occasional edits to our versioned enterprise GDB. They currently share a handful of concurrent Advanced licenses. We will now either need to more than double our number of licenses which will blow our budget out of the water (even if we downgraded them to Standard) and remain mostly unused, or force a few of them to do the work that a dozen of them were doing and that they may not even have a part in. That feels pretty crummy to be honest.

[LindsayRaabe_FPCWA]

It's certainly going to make a lot of organisations have to rethink the way they divvy up work responsibilities, or get creative in the way that they achieve those tasks. We're looking at a budget increase as well. Our hard part is trying to gauge just how many people actually need access to different license levels (in a changing workforce) and going through the contract variation process once, and not multiple times. 

[Bud]

It'll mean fewer people will use GIS. That's not what anyone wants, including Esri. Some users are losing Pro and are back to using Excel.

[LindsayRaabe_FPCWA]

I feel like there's a gap in the licensing model. An ArcGIS Pro Basic license without Creator capabilities. More like an Add On to Mobile Workers or Contributors. Access to use the software for editing but not creation. That's how most of our users use Pro. WebMap, feature services and data publishing is all managed by the GIS Section.

[ChelseaRozek]

Interesting. The gap for us would be a license level before Pro is included that allows for full control of items in AGO (like the "Publisher" role). For us, Pro is too intimidating for our lite GIS users to want to learn, but they're willing to dabble with creating AGO things like storymaps or their own webmaps from our org's layers. Even our entry-level editors will need a standard Pro license, so at least the Professional user type, as they're editing versioned data on our enterprise geodatabase, so I'm not seeing much of a use case yet for the Creator user type. Our rep hinted at editing branch versions as an a la carte add on in the future, which would make Basic much more useful, but we'll see if that actually happens.

Update: if you like the "publisher" user type too, upvote this idea! Another use case is for users who have to be in multiple portals but don't want to have to waste unused Pro licenses/$$ for a Creator level