Monday, November 24, 2008

ERDAS IMAGINE / LPS 9.3.1 available

ERDAS IMAGINE / LPS 9.3.1 and ERDAS ER Mapper 7.2 SP1 are now available for download from the erdas.com support website. There are customer reported issues and some enhancements available in these service packs.

ERDAS IMAGINE / LPS 9.3.1 requires a pre-installed version of ERDAS IMAGINE / LPS 9.3. ERDAS ER Mapper 7.2 SP1 requires installed version of ERDAS ER Mapper 7.2.

Friday, November 14, 2008

ERDAS IMAGINE 9.3 Shipping

ERDAS took receipt of the ERDAS 2009 DVD Media Kits on Oct. 31, 2008 and began shipping ERDAS IMAGINE 9.3 on the following Monday November 3, 2008. I have spoken with the ERDAS shipping department recently and they expect to have all DVD Media packs shipped out to ERDAS customers and ERDAS Distributors by early December.

The ERDAS 2009 DVD Media Kits consist of two dual-layer DVDs containing all ERDAS software and data examples for all ERDAS products. Be sure to load ERDAS ER Mapper 7.2 and give it a try, especially the mosaic tools.

Also, if you have not tried ERDAS TITAN, you might want to give it a look. I believe Universities will especially benefit from ERDAS TITAN’s sharing ability. I know when I was at the Georgia Tech Center for GIS I always had staff and students in the School of Architecture want to know if I had data in this area or that area. If ERDAS TITAN was around then, it sure would have saved me time and maybe kept me from being grumpy when the tenth student emailed about this data or that data for the project they have due in one week. Students…. Gotta love ‘em.

Back to ERDAS IMAGINE 9.3, you could download the install executable from the ERDAS Website under the Products > ERDAS IMAGINE > Download page. Here's the link.

http://www.erdas.com/Products/ERDASProductInformation/tabid/84/currentid/1050/default.aspx

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Strange Rumor Concerning Backwards Compatibility in 9.3

I have recently heard a strange rumor concerning backwards compatibility in ERDAS IMAGINE 9.3. In case you hear the rumor, just ignore it. ERDAS IMAGINE 9.3 has image and vector backwards file compatibility to pervious verisons of .img, .lan, .gis, .tif and many more raster data, as well vector data created within the product line since the introduction of commercial ERDAS software in 1982.

I had another question on "backwards compatibility," dealing with license files rather than data files. Here is a comment on that:

The entire licensing technology was changed for ERDAS IMAGINE 9.3. The FlexNet license manager is now used and the system IDs are thus required to be different. Nevertheless, customer can have ERDAS IMAGINE 9.2 and earlier versions of license managers on the same system as ERDAS IMAGINE 9.3. As with all versions, only one version of IMAGINE can run at a time.

When ERDAS switched to the new licensing system, ERDAS streamlined the process and addressed many of the places where errors occurred for customers installing license files. So, ERDAS hopes the pain of obtaining new license files has been minimized.

Finally, note that there is no price difference between node-locked and floating licenses for ERDAS IMAGINE. If a customer receives node locked license and rather wanted floating licenses (and are not changing the license manager machine), they need only ask for floating licenses. This has been ERDAS policy since ERDAS IMAGINE supported floating license files in about 1992.