We receive many questions about FME licenses related to the various editions of FME Desktop. Customers want to know what they need in order to use FME with their Oracle database or to have FME Server read from an ESRI ArcSDE database.
The FME Desktop Professional Edition is the basic version, containing the same internal FME functionality that is also included in the other editions. The only extended functionality of the other editions is the ability to read and write a number of specific data formats.
To do this, FME requires software components from the suppliers of the products that belong to these data formats. For example, the Esri Edition of FME uses software components from a licensed Esri installation on the same machine. In order to be able to read an ArcSDE Raster dataset, therefore, in addition to an FME Desktop Esri Edition, a licensed Esri installation is required on the same computer. FME must be able to access the relevant software components in order to execute them. Safe Software cannot or may not supply these components.
For FME Server, the same principle applies: Additional software components from the relevant suppliers must be installed. The only difference is that the FME Server license already contains all the functionality of all Desktop editions. Discover the differences between FME Desktop and FME Server here.
We can have extensive discussions with you about the exact versions of components that work together. And Safe Software has, of course, also written a few things about this.
https://knowledge.safe.com/articles/1517/notes-on-fme-and-esri-versions-and-compatibility.html
https://knowledge.safe.com/articles/24153/using-fme-server-with-esri-software.html
Note: The differences between 32-bit and 64-bit FME are especially important for the collaboration with 32-bit and 64-bit versions of this additional software.
