I am interested in this question, but for different reasons. I only know ArcGIS Pro since I never used ArcMap. It is not optimized to be used the way I need it to, and I think that results in the extremely slow performance often times. The biggest problem I find is that, as a consultant with many clients and many different projects with each client, often juggling data to/from multiple sources requires me to have multiple GDB on each project. Simple projects, or projects where my company is in charge of 100% of the data in and out, a single GDB for the project works. I have heard of governments having a single GDB that is shared by many staff/groups/organizations within their government realm and that just seems crazy to me, but if it is mainly a collection of relatively stable reference information, it probably works well. Always changing, dynamic, data going in/out doesn't seem to work well with a single GDB. So I end up with lots of them on a single complex project just to keep all the information straight. Versioning within a single GDB results in a mess of feature classes to try and sort through to find what you are looking for even if you have good procedures for naming etc. I am not sure if this is a good practice, much less a best practice. It seems to me to be dependent on the data.
The other issue I have is that Project data needs to be independent for each project and saved with all of the data for that project. I don't mean just all the GIS data for the project, I mean ALL of the data for a project needs to be saved in the project folder for that project. So for instance, say I am working with a client to design, plan, and permit a wind farm. The project is the wind farm. I am going to have all sorts of document files for permit applications, studies, wetland delineations, utility information, civil design from CAD, and maps from GIS. It is all interrelated and all owned by the client for the project in the end. My company uses Sharepoint to save ALL of the data for each Project. So there is a Sharepoint site and a GIS folder in that Sharepoint site where all the GIS data for the Project is housed. This is the biggest failure of ArcGIS Pro. It is so dead set against you saving files to sharepoint or other "network" or "cloud" drives that it won't even let you browse to them. You have to go into the folder in Windows Explorer, copy the address from the address bar, then paste into the address bar in the open and save windows of ArcGIS Pro just to be able to open or save anything in the Sharepoint folder. To make things worse, it has real issues trying to sync files. Files take forever to open/close and if you don't close out of ArcGIS Pro often and especially before your computer enters sleep mode, it wont sync at all and you have to open the file from the backup on your computer. Not a huge deal, unless a different user needs to work on the same project and your changes didn't sync to Sharepoint. Once another user opens the file from Sharepoint, that never was synced, you now have an issue that I don't even know how to resolve because you have two different updated files that will conflict. You just need to pick which version survives I guess. I get that ESRI wants us to all be using their cloud service, but that just isn't workable for consultants in the AEC world where data needs to stay with the Project as a whole, not just the "GIS Project".
Cheers,
Justin
