Taking ArcGIS Pro Offline
With recent updates to ArcGIS Pro licensing (specifically, the removal of Single Use/Concurrent Use SU/CU licenses from education agreements), there have been questions related to accessing ArcGIS Pro in an ‘offline’ environment.
There are a range of use cases and situations that we have heard from you and if we missed any, please add them into the comments, or just reach out to us.
Getting Started: allowing offline use of ArcGIS Pro
First and foremost, offline licensing of ArcGIS Pro should be enabled from within the licensing ArcGIS Online organization.
This setting can be found under ‘Licenses’ in ArcGIS Online and then ‘Manage ArcGIS Pro settings’:
This is currently a ‘global’ option. Administrators can enable/disable ArcGIS Pro offline licenses for the entire organization, but there is no way to enable this capability for a specific role, user, or group. A request for this capability has been logged with Esri’s product team.
“How long can I take ArcGIS Pro offline for?”
If ArcGIS Pro is available for offline use – users will see the option available under Settings, Licensing, Authorize Pro to work offline:
When users ‘tick’ this box, they can take ArcGIS Pro offline for the duration of their license term. A future enhancement to ArcGIS Online will allow administrators to set the length of time that a license can be checked out for.
In the screenshot below – I have taken ArcGIS Pro offline. We can see that my Advanced license expires on 6/13/2025 and the username ‘bbaldwin_EIA’ is listed as the authorized user.
So – my user now has a license checked out on his/her machine – and they are good to go!
“What if I check out a license on 6/10/2025…?”
If the user above (with a license expiring on 6/13/2025) checks out a license on 6/10/2025 and heads into the field, the license of ArcGIS Pro will expire on 6/13/2025 and ArcGIS Pro will fail to open/work.
All education license holders (for higher education) have term licenses that renew annually. At the renewal date, the licenses refresh and users can then check out a license for the next year.
If license administrators know that they have a group of users that are heading into the field, it could be possible to extend the term date of the subscription, while working on renewal or initiate an ‘early renewal’, to issue licenses prior to the renewal .
You also have an option to permanently change the timing of your license renewal (i.e. end of spring semester, versus Summer field work), so that field work is not impacted.
Please reach out to your Account Manager to discuss possible options.
Air Gapped Environments – AKA: “We have a sensitive research lab that is ‘black-boxed’ and has no internet access”
There could be isolated use cases where a named user license that is checked out from Esri’s central ArcGIS Online licensing servers is not feasible.
For these use cases, we are working on an option to provide Single-Use ArcGIS Pro at a nominal cost.
Please reach out to your Account Manager.
Things to Note
- If you take a license offline with ArcGIS Pro, it must be ‘returned’ to sign-in on another computer. This can (and has) caused headaches in situations where a student checks-out a license on the home computer and then tries to sign-in on a lab machine.
- If a license administrator ‘disables’ offline licenses in ArcGIS Online, but licenses are already checked out by users in ArcGIS Pro, those licenses will continue to function.
If there are any other use cases or questions that are not covered here, please add comments to the blog or reach out directly to us at highered@esri.com.