If you logged into ArcGIS Online in the past few days, you may have been greeted by a nasty note about exceeding the “number of licenses assigned” in the middle of your screen:
Thanks to some legwork by Jerry Prince at EAST and Charlie Fitzpatrick at Esri, I can share the cure for this malady. The bottom line is that Esri has been making some changes in the “User Types” used by their system, and they’re pushing all of their accounts to change from a User Type of “Creator” to one of “GIS Professional Advanced” (sounds fancy, doesn’t it?). The only “gotcha” is that you may have to do this for many users, so I’ll show you the easy way to do that.
After signing into ArcGIS Online, make sure that you are on the “Organization” tab, and then click on “Members” in the blue bar.
If you have more than 20 members in your organization, you’ll note that this page only shows 20 members at a time by default. Thankfully, if you’re like me and have a lot of members, you can go to the bottom of the page and tell it to display up to 100 members per page:
Go back up to the top of the page and check the checkbox next to “Member” at the very top of the list to select all members on the page. If your account is also displayed on this page, you’ll need to uncheck the box next to it, as you can’t manage it at the same time as everyone else (you’ll repeat these steps just for your account). Above the list, several options will appear; you want to click on the option to “Manage User Types”:
In the “Manage user type / role” window, click on the arrows to the right of “User types assigned”:
Click on “GIS Professional Advanced”. You might also want to Roles assigned; you probably want everyone except you to be a “Publisher”, so you can take care of that at the same time if you wish. Finally, click the “Save” button. You’ll be prompted to confirm that you really want to update the User/Role of you members; you will of course click “OK”:
You’ll be returned to your Members list, where you should see that everyone now has a User Type of “GIS Professional Advanced”, except possibly yourself (you’ll fix that in a minute).
Before selecting another page of members (if you’ve got more than 100) or fixing your account, you should take this opportunity to manage add-on licenses for everyone. While all the members are still selected, click the option at the top of the list to “Manage add-on licenses”:
Because you’ve got enough licenses for all your members to have every license, I recommend saving yourself some effort in the future by simply granting every license to everyone. This includes the extensions for ArcGIS Pro, the ArcGIS Urban Suite app bundle, and all the other Applications – just select them all, then click the “Save” button at the bottom:
There is the possibility that you’ll see an Add-on License that shows (in red) that you’ve got more licenses in use than are available – this means that that particular app license is no longer part of the Education bundle. I ran into this with CityEngine, which previously was a separate license. Now it’s part of the ArcGIS Urban Suite. Regardless, if you see such an issue in your account, you’ll need to remove those licenses from the members to which they were assigned, else you’ll keep seeing that same warning box when you sign in!
That’s the basic process. Don’t forget to go back and assign the correct User Type and Add-On Licenses for yourself. If you’ve got more than 100 members, you can then go to the next page and repeat the process. Either way, it won’t take you long once you get used to it.
Feel free to contact me if you have questions or problems.
-Malcolm Williamson