Hi Kerry - Over the years we've looked into options for offline communication and data sharing between field crews including evaluating some of the ideas behind, if not quite the implementation of, Atak from DOD. That sort of domain-specific functionality really hasn't been the right fit for what we were envisioning, but I am intrigued by the COT interoperability of the GeoChat functionality and the ability to attach features as described in the Mission Responder literature.
I'll be honest, at this point that's about as far as we've been able to get - our ESRI BPA client managers informed us that Mission Responder was not available for evaluation in our lab environment due to some IP licensing costs so I have yet to see it in action.
I think at the end of the day we are interested in implementing a common field safety and coordination layer across our apps that would facilitate communication and location sharing between app users in a disconnected environment. This would be independent of any data collection/sync workflow and probably be geared specifically toward intra-team coordination as opposed to sending track logs back to a central server like the tracking functionality in Field Maps.
We have been looking at possibly using the Brigefy API do implement this, however I figured it was worth asking if this is an area where ESRI is thinking of supporting before we go off and roll our own solution. We've had the experience over the years (offline, location tracking, building floorpans, external GNSS, etc...) where we implement our own solution to something only to have ESRI roll something out a year or two later. Not a terrible problem to have, but we do try to plan ahead when possible 🙂
