To help the annual maintenance of Esri licenses, new tool, dashboard or improved view of organization's licenses is needed.
From MyEsri it's too complicated to have a clear view of organization's all licenses. Despite of that, it lacks information that is essential for license owning organization. AGOL account's view to licenses is clearer, but lacks the same essential information as MyEsri and also view to Portal licenses.
Improvements needed for license management:
- There should be columns where customer organization can enter the business unit / department etc. who owns the license in question. In many organizations licenses are bought from Esri as one company but cost are divided between units inside the company according to unit's use of licenses.
I personally have worked in three that kind of companies and in all of them dividing the licenses to right cost places drives persons in charge completely sane. Since there is no functionality in MyEsri/AGOL for handling the units inside the company, you have to manage cost division in separate Excel file; that always means errors and human mistakes, especially if you have dozens of licenses to handle.
Solution proposal: Add possibility to add more metadata columns for corporate data for filtering (or have at least some number of free columns).
Please see the mock picture attached.
- Keeping in touch what license each user has, is impossible to do without external Excel, causing again errors and human mistakes. Also, since product and license names are constantly changing, it is very difficult to see what license bought with one name means in license list next year since it has changed its name. Having general view to company resources at one glance is impossible currently.
Solution proposal: all information related to the license should be visible in one view:
- current product name, license type and license number - all this information maintained by Esri Inc.
Please see the mock picture attached and please notice, that it is the same view in question both for seeing and maintaining customer organization's internal information and license information maintained by Esri Inc.
- As an enterprise user organization, you have to be aware of both desktop users and licenses as well as AGOL users and their roles. At the moment there is no view to see that information collected.
Solution proposal: Desktop and AGOL licenses should be listed in the same view so user doesn't have to jump between AGOL and MyEsri pages to find out, what licenses organization already has, what are in use and how many active users there are in portal.
I hope this poor view of licenses that customers have had to settle for years will be improved soon.
