Managing ArcGIS floating licenses
It's not fun. The two things we have in place to help this out are the following:
- We have an intranet site which lists the current ArcGIS license usage. This puts it on the user to check the intranet when they have a license issue and do the calls themselves. It's still not great, but it mostly works.
- We also have the 9.3 License Checker Extension, which brings up a dialog to remind users of which extensions they have active, and tells them which license they're using. You can set the popup frequency on install, though I'd recommend the once daily option (you can also chose once per session, or once every time you open a new .mxd) - too often and it becomes just another click-through box to users.
All that said, if I could wave a magic wand I'd love to see the following:
ArcGIS should automatically grab a license when required by a tool and then release it once the tool has finished. That way the license server only blocks if everyone decides to use SA etc. all at once. (You could do this in Python, but you have to script every tool that needs a license, and then get your users to use the scripted versions...)
You can control it with OpenLM for ArcGIS.
OpenLM monitors application usage, and determines whether it is active or sitting idle, consuming expensive licenses