Major usability upgrade in ArcGIS

Wednesday, 17 December, 2008

Yes it’s true, ESRI have finally ditched the requirement for the use a USB dongle (or old style parallel port dongle) in favour of a keyless authentication system. OK, so this is not a “feature” related in anyway to spatial processing, but it finally means the whole rigmarole of dongles is gone. Much of this patch is actually related to laptop usability. I’ve blogged before about the frustration of using a dongle based system and I think this move probably reflects the increased use of ArcGIS on laptops. In fact many of the other fixes in this patch related to laptop use and specifically the need to hibernate laptops and plug/unplug the dongle. I previously had set up a couple of batch scripts to manually start and stop the license server to get around this but its nice to see it sorted out properly.