I'm curious what software you and other media agencies use to make the maps (ESRI?) and how they manage their GIS data (any enterprise GIS software or just a bunch of shapefiles sitting on a network share)? Do they actively collect datasets or just pull it in as needed?
We use QGIS at the Post, which is open source. For organizing shapefiles, we don't really use anything fancy, just a shared folder. If we find something very useful, we put it in there.
PostGIS is awesome. I was only exposed to ESRI at university (ArcIMS) and can still remember how I felt when someone told me I could have a world-class spatial engine for free.
ESRI/ArcServer is just too expensive for smaller organisations especially once you add in the cost of licensing SQL Server or Oracle.
> ESRI/ArcServer is just too expensive for smaller organisations especially once you add in the cost of licensing SQL Server or Oracle.
I spent most of a year 2yrs ago trying to sell support for QGIS and PostGIS and GIS support in general to local municipalities but that died a very slow death as I had no idea how to sell to any government agency :(
Based on some arms-length interactions with the USGS, my impression is that they use ESRI stuff for basically everything spatial. Ditto for my city I think. The extent of the ESRI monopoly/entrenchment in government is maddening to me considering the licensing costs, the high quality of the open-source alternatives, and the fact that I'm footing the bill. When I was taking some GIS classes at a public university I wondered out loud if the classes would be about GIS or about "using ESRI products". When I inquired about having students learn to do the work with QGIS there was some hemming and hawing and "well we really don't know much about open source tools" and I got handed an install image of ArcGIS. I feel like I paid about 1/2 of my tuition to learn GIS fundamentals and the other 1/2 to pay for training on ESRI products.
Most places don't have anything, they make requests through their engineer and have no access to the data themselves. I also wanted to consolidate things like property records.
But yeah, everyone who had a set up was ESRI :( Arc works with PostGIS, supposedly.
I'm not sure QGIS is quite ready for your average municipal GIS user yet. I did 6 years at a city and was involved with a regional GIS users group - it was an odd mix of people trained in geospatial sciences (geography/forestry etc) and people who had attended a couple of ESRI classes after they were told to learn GIS - ArcGIS desktop is a more visually refined experience especially if you are used to the windows world. Likewise with PostGIS - SQL is a scary tool for many GIS staff. It's frustrating in some ways but also a sign of job security for the immediate future!
I work for an organization with several GIS groups and there is a strong push to get everyone under the IT umbrella. When I see the sums of money IT are looking to pay for ArcGIS Server/Portal/Online + database licensing I see a LOT of potential developer hours being burned up in licensing. Sadly many IT shops strongly favour COTS solutions and ESRI are the Microsoft of the GIS world....
I also would be interested in how people organize vector datasets. Between GRASS, shapefiles, postgres, and geojson files (the four types of file storage I utilize most often) I find keeping organized to require an unusual amount of effort. I've looked into CKAN for datasets I want to share, but haven't taken the leap yet and wonder if it will just add to the complexity instead of reducing it.
