PlanetGIS User Guide/Licensing & Support
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Contents |
Technical support
There are several avenues for obtaining technical support. You are always welcome to send us an email at support@planetgis.co.za, but please help us to minimize our email load by trying to find your answers, if not in this guide, in the resources listed below. If your question is dealt with sufficiently in one of the resources listed below we will refer you to that resource.
Planet GIS does not provide call-centre support. Telephonic and/or remote assistance will be initiated if necessary, and can be requested via email. Call-centre support may be obtained through one of our partners listed below.
The FAQ
The Frequently Asked Questions page on the PlanetGIS website (www.planetgis.co.za/faq.php) maintains an easily accessible list of answers to the questions that are asked most often. This is the first place you should go for your questions.
The support forum
The online forum is the place where every user of PlanetGIS can contribute by offering solutions, suggesting improvements or make requests for new functions. Posting your question here (www.planetgis.co.za/forum) allows any user to contribute a solution and future seekers to find the solutions to similar problems.
The Wiki
The Wiki (www.planetgis.co.za/wiki.php) is the most recent version of the User Guide and a good place to look for solutions that has not been published in the User Guide yet. This is also a way for you to get involved in enhancing and adding content to the User Guide. You can place your question on a relevant page that should contain the answer as well as discuss issues with the documentation on a particular page's discussion page. You are also free to edit any of the content in the wiki.
Email support
We will answer every question received via email from a licensed & registered user. At times the volume of email we receive make it impossible to respond quickly, but should you not receive a reply within 48 hours, please try again or make contact through the support forum in case your email is getting blocked.
Support agreements
Purchasing a support agreement entitles you to priority support. A support agreement is valid for one year and may be purchased or renewed on the PlanetGIS website. With a support agreement in place, you can be assured of many more hours of our time at your disposal than without.
Third party support
A number of consulting firms offer a level of support that we do not. You will find them on our partners page (www.planetgis.co.za/partners.php). Since we do not offer “call centre†support, we rely on these companies who are in a better position to develop a close relationship with the client. Municipal, governmental users and large corporates are typically referred to a service provider ideally located and skilled to fulfil their needs.
Licensing
Licensing for PlanetGIS software fall into 7 categories:
- Free
- Trial
- Education
- Licensed desktop products
- Web publishing
- Developer
- Custom
Free
PlanetGIS Explorer and the trial versions of the other software components may be copied, installed and redistributed without limitation, provided the software is distributed exactly in the same form as may be downloaded from the official website (www.planetgis.co.za).
Trial
Trial versions of PlanetGIS Cartographer, Professional and Enterprise do not have an expiration period and are not functionally limited, except for the number of features that may be stored in a single map. This limit has been set at 5000, which makes it possible to use the trial versions on fairly large maps and in most cases adequate for educational or evaluation purposes. You can open, view, manipulate, print, etc. maps with more than 5000 features with a trial version, but you won't be able to save any changes. You may also freely distribute these versions with or without maps provided you distribute them in exactly the same form as they may be downloaded from our website.
Education & non profit
In the event that the trial versions are not suitable for a school, tertiary learning institution or non profit organization we will consider a request for a full version to be provided at no cost. However, for receiving support & updates to the software, such an organization may purchase an educational license, which for the cost of a single user license allows an unlimited number of students to use the software. All correspondence must be through the teacher.
Licensed desktop products
PlanetGIS Cartographer, Professional and Enterprise are licensed for a specified number of users at an organization. A license is identified by a unique license key which is in the format of XXX-XXX-XXX-XXX-XXX. (5 groups of 3 alphanumerical characters1). The license code is provided by Planet GIS (the company) or authorized resellers.A license key has the organization's name encoded into it and will not be accepted if the organization name is not entered exactly as it was entered when the key was generated. (Capitalization, spaces and punctuation are not important). The license key must be entered each time the software is installed.
In addition to the software installation being expressly licensed, you are also encouraged to register each installation of your product. Registration is optional, but required if you wish to install updates. You are allowed to install & register your product on as many computers as is required for operation by yourself. If your organization has acquired, for example, a 3-user license, each user can register the software on a desktop as well as a laptop, a home computer, etc. The procedure of registering your product will generate a unique registration key which will have your user name encoded into it and can only be used in conjunction with your name.
Web publishing
The PlanetGIS Web server is licensed per CPU (not core) and includes a single user license of PlanetGIS Professional for creating and maintaining the maps, if your organization does not have a PlanetGIS desktop product already.
A trial version of the web publisher is also available. This version displays a link to the PlanetGIS website in the bottom-right corner of each rendered map image. This trial version may be used indefinitely by students, schools and non-profit organizations. There is no specific evaluation time period set for commercial websites, but it is assumed that the trial version will only be used for as long as is necessary to properly evaluate the suitability of the software.
Developer
The PlanetGIS OCX component is licensed to organizations on a per-developer or per-application model. The component may then be included in 3rd party products without royalty fees.
Custom
Licensing agreements can be customized for a client's specific needs. An example of such would be the client choosing to pay royalty fees.
