What are you using for an emergency offline mapping alternative?

[MichelleBoivin]

I work in a moderate utility company (~180,000 customers). After Hurricane Michael and due to recent events internally, I am looking for an offline alternative for maps for our field crews. Currently we are using Portal for most everything, which works well as long as the internal network is up and as long as internet access through providers is available. However, in anticipation of a situation where neither of those are working and they need an alternative for the field, what is everyone using?

ArcReader and Publisher are one alternative, but the overhead on that for a small 1-2 person GIS to maintain, in my opinion, is not the most efficient. In addition, the field crews begin to rely on that software rather than Portal (past experience). The Mobile Map Package and Explorer are another option, but we are not an ArcGIS Pro shop, strictly Desktop at the moment. The number of layers they need access to are quite a few and some attribute information would be required as well.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts....

[RobertBorchert]

Look into Carry Map from Data East. 

One of the distribution coops. I work with has 75000 meters and their system is set up to publish a new CarryMap in the middle of the night and push it out to the line crews iPads every night.

That way the crews can have data that is  as old as that morning.

You can also export map packages every night and they can use ArcGIS Explorer

[MichelleBoivin]

Thank you for your response Robert. I will take a look.

[MarkBockenhauer]

Michelle,

If you do decide to give ArcGIS Pro and Explorer a try this article may help https://community.esri.com/community/gis/applications/arcgis-pro/blog/2018/01/20/use-arcgis-pro-21-t...

Mark

[MichelleBoivin]

Thank you Mark.

[TravisAnderson]

Michelle,

This is a little late, but the first app that I ever found and used on a smart phone that allowed you to load shape files locally to the device was iGIS. It didn’t need cell coverage to work. That was around 9 years ago. We still use it today since we regularly go in and out of cell/data coverage. We only have 10 people using it and generally it’s used to locate an asset, such as a hydrant. I believe it has much more functionality than what we utilize. It is nice to have a backup app that stores layers locally. There have been many times when I was driving our rural Ohio roads with no coverage and not 100% sure where I was. I can open iGIS and use the devices GPS to get me back to civilization. I guess it would be similar to using Collector Offline permanently. 

Travis