[Qgis-community-team] QGIS - French Ministry of Environment

[Abbas Abdul Wahab]

Thanks for the information. I will be giving a talk on QGIS early next month to the Malaysian Dept of Irrigation and Drainage so this tip will come in handy in generating confidence because here, another Government is complimenting QGIS.

Abbas @ badaveil


----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeremy G" <jeremy.grx at gmail.com>
To: "MORREALE Jean Roc" <jr.morreale at enoreth.net>
Cc: "qgis-community" <Qgis-community-team at lists.osgeo.org>, "qgis-developer" <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2010 3:22:40 PM GMT +08:00 Beijing / Chongqing / Hong Kong / Urumqi
Subject: Re: [Qgis-community-team] QGIS - French Ministry of Environment


Jean Roc, 

2010/9/26 MORREALE Jean Roc < jr.morreale at enoreth.net > 



Hi, here is a very short resume of a QGIS party that was organized a few 
days ago by the French Ministry of Environment (MEEDDM [1]) to exchange 
informations on Quantum GIS, in order to determine the possibility of 
its use as one of their GIS desktop tools. Most of the participants were 
technical members of the ministry and its local branches, and Vincent 
Picavet (OSGEO-fr treasurer) and I (OSGEO-fr/QGIS). 

QGIS is being used internally for months by some of their agents or 
departments in parallel with the actual official tool, which is MapInfo. 
The ministry is ongoing a rationalization of their actual software base, 
leading to the adoption of web gis and the study of alternative desktop 
tools, namely QGIS. This ministry has already switched to OpenOffice and 
changed their Access databases to PostGIS. 

No decision has been taken yet but the general opinion on QGIS was 
positive, the ministry's technical teams have already produced 
documentation set for their internal formations and are conducting use 
tests with several services. The main point was to determine if QGIS was 
able to fulfill 100% of MapInfo's uses and the answer was mixed : no on 
some aspects (no "font/annotation" layer type, different proportional 
symbols aka #960, etc.) and far more on others (labelv2, symbology, sql, 
etc.). 

Several tests were also done to determine the effort needed to customize 
QGIS, and two tools were developed : 
- SelectPlusFr, a plugin based on Barry ROWLINGSON's SelectPlus 
extending the selection tools 
- OpenWOR, a plugin which allows to partly open .wor file in QGIS (I'll 
post more on that later) 

A decision on migrating part of the software base is still to be 
discussed, but the technical team of the ministry already intends to 
contribute code (aforementioned plugins at least) and would like to 
provide financial support to QGIS in some way. 

Regards, 
MORREALE Jean Roc 


These are great news, thanks for keeping us posted. An adoption by an institution like a minister could lead to a better consideration for QGIS inside universities, for instance (I'm still facing the old "it's not serious, it's free software" leitmotiv from University prof. here). 

Jeremy 

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