GIS Admins (Higher Ed) - Community Meeting and Resources for upcoming licensing changes

GeriMiller · ‎05-19-2024

Education Colleagues:

We have a number of important licensing changes ahead of us. We have communicated the removal of ArcGIS Desktop (ArcMap and ArcGIS Pro SU/CU) consistently and in numerous ways. By now, you have also likely heard the announcement of Esri User Types changes. Please review the following blog describing what this user type configuration change means for Education. Please also take a look at this video (Passcode: Sy!k0!2W) explaining some of these upcoming changes.

In addition, we will also have a GIS Admins Community Meeting Q&A session, meant to serve as accompanying discussion to the above messaging and resources. The purpose of the meeting would be to answer questions, hear comments, address concerns, hear from fellow license administrators, learn from each other, interact as a community. Please join us, if interested, and please feel free to email any questions ahead of time to highered@esri.com.

Date/time: Wednesday, May 29th at 11:00 am PT | 2:00 pm ET
Meeting: https://esri.zoom.us/j/778857623 (no registration required)

Last, please review our updated Best Practices for Managing ArcGIS app, outlining many of the recommended practices for deploying and administering ArcGIS in a secure and safe matter, while saving valuable time. We have been discussing these recommendations for quite some time, and hopefully they are not news. Of course, as time progresses and things change, these recommendations have evolved and will continue to evolve.

Look forward to seeing you there!

GeriMiller · ‎06-03-2024

FOLLOW UP - for those of you interested:

- Slides are here.

- Recording is here, password: T#br4#+# (note, recordings started ~10 min after the meeting began)

There were a couple of outstanding questions, and we will post answers to those shortly.

BrianBaldwin · ‎06-04-2024

We had a number of questions during the webinar - please find the detailed responses below:

How to take a license offline – if someone is offline when we cross over the license renewal date?

When a user takes a license offline, the timeout date of the license will coincide with the organization's license renewal date. So, if a license is taken offline on July 20th and the organization renews on August 1st, the license will timeout and will need to be refreshed.

In isolated instances (remote research over summer, etc.), customers have the ability to ask for a ‘maintenance extension’ – where renewal dates can be extended. Please reach out to your Account Manager or Customer Service Representation to ask about an extension to help ensure that software timeout dates don’t take place over the summer break.

Esri recently released a ‘stand-alone’ licensing vehicle for ArcGIS Pro. There will be more information to follow on how this will impact education customers.

AGO Assistant – can I use that to migrate accounts and group membership when we set up SAML accounts?

The ArcGIS Assistant (https://assistant.esri-ps.com/) provides a UI based tool to manage user content, but not groups.

It is possible to migrate user group memberships via the ArcGIS API for Python. The documentation includes a sample notebook/script that demonstrates how one could move content and group membership via the API, please see the following documentation: Move existing user content to a new user

It is also possible to use 3rd party tools like the Admin Tools offering from Esri partner GeoJobe. GeoJobe offers a free edition (there is also a paid version with more functionality) that provides a wealth of great tools for managing content, groups, and users in ArcGIS Online.

If an ArcGIS Pro license is checked out for offline use and then the organization disables offline licensing, what happens?

If a user selects the ‘Authorize ArcGIS Pro to work offline’ checkbox in ArcGIS Pro and the ArcGIS Online administrator has not disabled the ‘Prevent members from taking ArcGIS Pro offline’ option, then a license will be checked out. If an administrator enables this option, but licenses have already been checked out, the ArcGIS Pro license will remain checked out. If a user signs back into the organization in ArcGIS Pro, the license will remain checked out. If the user checks the license back in with ArcGIS Pro and then attempts to check a license back out, they will receive an error message related to the organization disabling offline licenses.

Way to set up a ‘role’ of users that are allowed to take ArcGIS Pro offline?

This is not a capability found in the ArcGIS Online settings. Currently, ArcGIS Pro offline usage can be enabled/disabled across an entire ArcGIS Online organization.

If I am using ArcPy – can we authenticate without opening up ArcGIS Pro?

Yes, it is possible to run ArcPy scripts without directly opening the ArcGIS Pro application. For ArcGIS Pro, there are 4 conditions (one of which needs to be met) to ensure that a license is available. The conditions are outlined in this documentation (https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/arcpy/get-started/installing-python-for-arcgis-pro.htm#ESRI...)

It is also possible to install ArcGIS Server or ArcGIS Notebook Server – Advanced to access the ArcPy libraries.

What if a named user account logs into a machine and forgets to log out?

With named user credentials – users have the ability to log into 3 instances of ArcGIS Pro simultaneously. So, if a student logs into a lab machine and never logs out, they will still be able to log into a personal computer at home. We recommend that labs set timeout policies for their machines to ensure that student data and resources are protected in shared environments.

Will Custom Roles be affected in any way with the upcoming user type change?

We don’t anticipate any impact to customer roles with the upcoming user types changes. If you are worried about any breaking changes to scripts or automations that you have in place, please simply reach out to the highered@esri.com alias.

PeterKnoop · ‎06-05-2024

Regarding, "Way to set up a ‘role’ of users that are allowed to take ArcGIS Pro offline," if you are interested in seeing a mechanism developed for enabling specific users to take their ArcGIS Pro Named User license offline, then consider giving kudos to this ArcGIS Pro Idea: Allow specified AGOL users to take ArcGIS Pro licenses offline.