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....
