First of all I wish to give Esri much credit for opening up the power of ArcGIS for Desktop at Advanced license level (with Extensions) for non-commercial use via its ArcGIS for Home Use at a price of only $100 per annum.
However, I would like to see the bang for buck increased a little for its commercial users by beefing up the Basic (formerly known as ArcView) license level. Personally, I would like to see the name Basic for such a great product dispensed with, and that level called Standard with more or less the precise level of functionality that Standard (formerly known as ArcEditor) has today. The key restriction on this new Standard would be that it does not access an enterprise geodatabase only file geodatabases. The capability to update enterprise geodatabases would be just a paid extension to Standard that comes free with Advanced (formerly ArcInfo).
Some of the key additions to today’s Basic that I would recommend are:
- Unlock Frequency tool with Basic and Standard level licenses – we can already emulate this with Summary Statistics but why make it harder to find?
- Permanent Sort at Standard & Basic License Levels or as an alternative let us Save Table View File to “implement” Permanent Sort Rows & Re-order Fields
- Include the Split tool
- Include the Erase tool
- Create a tool that disperses points that are on top of each other
- Extend Attachments toolset to the Basic License level for file geodatabases
- Licensing to allow Basic to edit/create relationship classes in file geodatabases
- If Basic cannot become the new Standard then perhaps Make Standard the New Advanced License
- MapInfo TAB and MID/MIF import/export within ArcView because this functionality is easily found in QGIS but many would prefer to have only one Desktop GIS installed
It’s a small thing, but while we are talking about license levels could Esri please Restore license level to window name – it seems bizarre that it was removed.
If you are keen to see any/all of the above implemented, then I encourage you to follow the links to find corresponding ArcGIS Ideas awaiting your vote.