This might read more like an editorial piece or blog post, but please hear my central question: are there any agencies out there that are enterprise Esri 'shops' who have robust and clean system of integration with a division that's adamant about using SARTopo?
Scenario: over the last couple of decades, our county has built a large, well-coordinated enterprise Esri GIS, centralizing and organizing droves of data that's being developed and maintained by nearly every county department (forestry, 911 communications, highways, land records, assessors, etc.) This includes both public-facing and internal web GIS in Portal and ArcGIS Online. But.....more and more recently, our emergency management division is being drawn into using SARTopo for their planning and operations. This is not solely for search-and-rescue but for all their operations. In an effort to understand why they are choosing that platform when they have nearly carte-blanche access to off-the-shelf solutions through our Esri licensing, here is what I learned:
- SARTopo is 'easier [for them] to use'.
- SARTopo allows easier sharing across agencies (i.e. county emergency managers can share it to local volunteer responders or state DNR).
- SARTopo allows them to easily track their personnel locations (users who are logged in on mobile devices) show as moving waypoints on their shared map.
Right-away I realized that bullets #2 and #3 above can be solved with Esri solutions, but they're not quick/easy like in SARTopo. They're going to require a lot of administrative user account management.
Unfortunately, we have users re-creating foundational datasets (e.g. schools), from scratch, manually, one-at-a-time, in SARTopo. This causes me great pain to witness. I've played around with SARTopo's ability to import web feature services from some of our Portal/ArcGIS Online services, but the lack of ability to adjust display/labeling makes them fairly useless.
So again: is there any agency out there that has explored the technical possibilities and come to a good/manageable/sustainable paradigm that supports both enterprise Esri environment and SARTopo use, without too much duplication of effort? Or do we need to build/deploy comparable Esri 'replacements' for the ways our emergency managers are using SARTopo?
