[mapguide-users] RE: MapGuide assistance

[Bracco Stefano]

Jon,

It is depending a lot in what you want to do with your MapGuide / CAD environment.
I'm coming from the Energy world (nuclear before, sustainable now), and I can tell that it was a nightmare just to explain the benefits to implement MapGuide and GIS software.
Now I work on several projects, one is related to Solar Power implementation and high power efficiency.
We have something like 40/50 people using our systems.
For licenses depends a lot on what you want to implement, we connected MapGuide to Oracle, but this can be useless in your case, depending your data, or can be an advantage.
In terms of staff we have one person, but it depends how much things you want to do: MapGuide is easy to install and maintain in my opinion, the difficult is to provide integration with Web GIS and implement additional functionalities because you don't have "out-of-the-box" solutions.
Another matter we discussed internally was the integration with CAD which is sometimes difficult to explain to people and it is also true that CAD people don't care about GIS and GIS people don't care about CAD most of the times, but a conversion of a CATIA File to DWF can be sometimes difficult to be integrated in a MapGuide server where you already serve 100 layers. It is more difficult when you want to mix the Product LifeCycle Management Platform with the GIS, which can be also useful if you have a complex network and a very complex system in your hands.
We started installing MapGuides and testing the different features, then I moved to build something more complex and looking for integration tools, most of them are free of charge and you do not have any license restriction, now we are able to use it, also if I think we have to improve processes and functionalities.
It took one year, now we are going to integrate part of this work with Local Government to exchange data, and this is another step. In the meanwhile we needed to create a common catalog to store information about where we stored the data, because we had several MapGuide systems and there was no clever way to search for spatial data stored into MapGuide servers.
I stress the fact that technically seems to be complex, but it is not true. The major complexity is to seat and to understand from your stakeholders where they want to go.

Just a brief idea of what is the direction you could move.

Stefano

 

-----Original Message-----
From: mapguide-users-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:mapguide-users-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Jon Cotey
Sent: Tuesday, 20 April, 2010 23:01
To: mapguide-users at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: [mapguide-users] RE: MapGuide assistance


What my company is really interested in is getting in touch with some
companies who have implemented MapGuide. Especially Electrical Utilities
and/or Solar Power.
We are wanting to question them on a number of items:
•System requirements
•Number of users
•License types & quantities
•Staff required to maintain
•Road blocks to implementation
•Current difficulties
•Etc
You know, just the basics.
 


-- 
View this message in context: http://n2.nabble.com/MapGuide-assistance-tp4932822p4933690.html
Sent from the MapGuide Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
_______________________________________________
mapguide-users mailing list
mapguide-users at lists.osgeo.org
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapguide-users