UW ESRI Technical Support

University of Washington ESRI Technical Assistance

If you are interested in taking software skills courses, talk to your departmental advising office.

If you are having licensing issues on computers that are clients of the UW ESRI license servers (i.e., your ESRI software does not start and gives you an error indicating a license problem), see the instructions on installing ArcGIS.

Getting technical assistance:

Notes (please read these first):

• This service is for students, staff, and faculty of the University of Washington only. If you are not a student, staff, or faculty of the University of Washington, you will need to contact ESRI directly.
• The technical contacts listed below are available to answer specific questions on technical issues related to the use of ESRI software products. This does not mean that they are available for ESRI software training, unless this is a specific duty of their position at the University of Washington.

The terms of UW's site license with ESRI do not permit individual users to get assistance directly from ESRI Product Support staff. Please do not attempt to call or contact ESRI if you are a student, staff, or faculty member.

Software use questions

If you are experiencing software use problems (e.g., you want to know how to perform an activity in ESRI software, or the software does not give you the results you expect), send a message to uw-gis-l, the local UW GIS mailing list. Questions on software use should be directed to this list as a first option.

Broken software questions

If you have a problem that you cannot resolve using the resources listed above, then you may submit a request for assistance to the designated 'technical contacts' on campus. They will attempt to resolve your problem, and if they cannot, will forward your request on to ESRI support.

DO NOT attempt to contact any of these people by telephone or e-mail unless one of the technical contacts instructs you to do so.

Please be aware that the technical contacts are available to help only on issues of software malfunction. If the software does not function according to the ESRI documentation (e.g., I get a 'segmentation violation' when I attempt to add a grid theme to a view in ArcView 3.1 or after installing ArcGIS 8.1, my computer went BSOD), then please do write to the technical contacts. However, if you are experiencing a software use issue (e.g., How do I add a grid theme to a view in ArcView? or How do I access my dbf files in ArcMap?), then please take advantage of uw-gis-l.

There are also Technical Notes, Discussion Forums, and Documentation Updates available through ESRI's web site.

It is important to give as much detailed information as possible. If the error cannot be recreated, it will most likely not be able to be solved.

If the problem cannot be solved with local expertise, the problem will be forwarded to ESRI technical support. If you neglect to include detailed information, your question will be returned to you, and you will then need to re-send your problem with the details as shown below.

This service is not for issues related to software use. It is to report software that does not function according to documentation (i.e., "broken software"). The technical contacts cannot open incidents with ESRI that are related to software use.

All the information listed below is necessary to log an incident. If you do not provide all this information, we cannot respond to your request for help. We need that information in order to pass your problem up to ESRI.

Technical request guidelines
Your message must include the following information:

* Your name

* Your phone number and e-mail address

* Your physical location

* Computer hardware description 
     (e.g., Sun Ultra 1, PC Clone)

* Computer operating system and version number 
     (e.g., Solaris 2.6, Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 3)

* Software, version, and module involved in the problem 
     (e.g., ArcView 3.1 Spatial Analyst 1.1, ARC/INFO 7.1.2 ArcEdit)

* Specific Command (what you were doing when you experienced the problem, including the exact steps.)
     (e.g. File Menu > Extensions > 3-D Analyst, Topogrid)

* Specific and complete error message, e.g.,

     Cannot edit table for theme: Country.shp

     FLEXlm Error: Cannot connect to license server

      The server (lmgrd) has not been started yet, or

      the wrong port@host or license file is being used, or the

      port or hostname in the license file has been changed.

      Feature: ARC/INFO

      Server name: gis1

      License path: c:\bin\esri\arcexe72\sysgen\license.dat

      FLEXlm error: -15,10. System Error: 10061 "(null)"

      For further information, refer to the FLEXlm End User Manual,

      available at "www.globetrotter.com".

      Program not run.

ESRI Technical Contacts at the University of Washington:

For service, send a single email message with a request for assistance to the group of technical contacts (esri@u.washington.edu). DO NOT attempt to call any of these contacts by telephone unless one of the technical contacts instructs you to do so. The email must follow the guidelines shown above. If your message does not include this information, it will be ignored. Whichever of the technical contacts reads their email first will forward your request for assistance on to ESRI's customer service, with a request that ESRI include you in their response.

Technical Contacts:

Rob Norheim	esri@u.washington.edu
Luke Rogers
Phil Hurvitz

Note: these technical contacts are available to answer specific questions on the use of ESRI software products. This does not mean that they are available for ESRI software training, unless this is a specific duty of their position at the University of Washington.

If you are interested in taking software skills courses, talk to your departmental advising office. ESRI also has training available, some of it free.

The University of Washington Spatial Technology, GIS, and Remote Sensing Page is provided by the College of Forest Resources and the College of Ocean and Fisheries Sciences through Unit-Specific UIF. Site administrator: Phil Hurvitz.