I’ve gotten a couple emails from folks asking me what I thought about “Mapserver Enterprise” (The quotes signify that the will change soon). Well my company has been looking at integrating Mapserver into our products to replace ArcIMS in some cases, but with the announcement of Autodesk entering the open source community, we’ve begun to look at their product also. As a consultant, we always look for ways to help out clients and if Mapserver or Mapguide works for the project, then we’ll use it.
In the 6 months since we’ve initiated the Mapserver development, I’ve been very impressed with the community built around it and wished there was something like this for other GIS development environments. Tech support delays at ESRI has gotten to the point were we almost never bother anymore. I remember the days when you’d call and be able to talk to a support rep on that one phone call. Now it can be days before anyone gets back to you. The last couple incidents I remember were all resolved before ESRI called us back to help and this in spite of the ESRI support website being of no help whatsoever. It is tough being an ESRI developer sometimes.
Update – I think we’ve beaten this horse to death so lets lay off of the “ESRI Support Sucks” comments. If you do have good suggestions, though please do post them and I’m sure ESRI will read them. I have been contacted by ESRI so they are listening and reading these comments. It could be a good opportunity to talk directly with ESRI support management.
[tags]mapserver, mapserverenterprise, mapguide, esri[/tags]
91 Comments
What about the support forums? For ArcIMS at least, finding information about how things work and why is extensive (whether it be in the user forum or in the knowledge base). Not that there isn’t room to improve for ESRI (ArcGIS server is a good example–but hey its new), but I don’t think that is good reason to jump to Mapserver Enterprise.
Mapserver Enterprise may indeed be quite powerful and may work for a lot of clients, but I would let the products features and cost decide which way you go.
Jeremy
We’ve mostly looked at adding Mapserver because many smaller organizations can’t afford to keep up on their maintenance. We’ve proposed ArcIMS/Server solutions only to be told they can’t afford it or aren’t up to date on their maintenance. I want a solution that allows them to focus on paying their ArcGIS Desktop maintenance and let the server side be “free”.
I just need and alternative to sell to clients who can’t or won’t go for an ArcIMS/Server proposal.
I agree with you James. ESRI Support is worthless these days. Our little city used to pay maintenance for technical support, but we aren’t going to do so anymore. We’ll get 9.2 and then thats it for us.
I’m not sure what is going on at ESRI these days, but it is making us look for other choices.
For an ESRI shop using Mapserver, adding IMSEMU into the mix is a nice way to retain desktop/server compatibility while getting all the Mapserver juicy goodness as well. See http://mapserver.refractions.net
Paul, I’m going to take a look at that right now. I don’t know how I missed that at all. Thanks!
Great post. I too am just about fed up with ESRI and their support. They don’t seem to care about anyone anymore. Their support site hasn’t been updated since it first showed up years ago and hasn’t grown with the technology.
I think they should hire you James to figure it all out and get it back on track to where it used to be.
OT, love the blog. I visit it many times a day.
For me, I use Google to search for tech support rather than use ESRI’s site. You can’t find anything there anymore. I was searching for some ArcGIS Server Java Doc info and couldn’t find it anywhere. Google pointed me to your blog which then showed me where the Java Doc is.
I personally havne’t logged into the ESRI forums in almost 2 years. ESRI needs to do something.
Put me down for a ESRI customer sick of ESRI Tech support. Stop treating us like dirt and help us out!
My company has moved into GIS during the past year for our development and considering what I’ve seen from Sun and IBM, ESRI is a joke.
Lets be honest, there is no developer support. I went to my first User Conference this year and I couldn’t believe how basic and closed minded it was. I won’t be going to it next year and I’m not sure we’ll be attending the Dev Summit either. ArcGIS Server is very powerful, but without a community it isn’t worth the effort.
James, you should start a developer community yourself. You are pretty much the only one who has kept us all together anyway.
Yea James, you should do it. Lets be honest, Planet Geospatial is the hub of all GIS blogs so why not http://dev.spatiallyadjusted.com too?
You guys should just use open source. Screw proprietary software!
Our company signed up for EDN because we thought it would be like MSDN. EDN isn’t a developer network at all, its just developer licenses that we could get ourselves because of our business partner status.
I won’t be getting it next year, that is for sure!
I can’t imagine not using ArcGIS but I do feel like I’m on an island at all times. All support is so basic that advanced GIS users are left to figure things out on their own.
Plus there are bugs that still exist from ArcGIS 8 that have yet to be fixed. ESRI, please help us!
ESRI support hasn’t been the same since ArcGIS 8 arrived. I just don’t even bother anymore with it. It used to be such a great community, but these days it isn’t fun anymore.
Too bad for everyone.
I could go on for pages on how bad we’ve been treated with ESRI support. Why should it take days to get a simple response? I’ve got clients expecting me to finish work on time and I’ve been held up by waiting for a response from ESRI.
ESRI is lucky there isn’t anyone else in the marketplace that completes with them or I’d leave in a second. For as much money as we pay in maintenance, I expect to get a response on the first call, not an email 2 days later. :@
What a bunch of junkies, complaining about their dealer. The quantities of money which are bandied about for licenses alone for ESRI software can purchase months of developer time in the open source world. Imagine having direct access to the people who wrote ArcIMS when you wanted ArcIMS support: that is what your money can buy you in open source world. Hell, even in the proprietary world: replace your ArcMap licenses with Manifold and dump the balance of the money onto Manifold to get whatever extra features you need built, or red-line priority support.
Now, tell me why I am being unrealistic. Go on, you know you want to.
At first I thought I was glad to see others were in the same boat as me, but it kind of depresses me.
We didn’t buy EDN because we didn’t see any value in it as we already had the software.
Paul,
You might be on to something. My IT budget has shrunk and we pay more for a couple ArcInfo, ArcGIS Server licenses than we do for all other software combined. I don’t mind paying maintenance if it is worth it and right now it isn’t.
Personally I can’t really say I’ve been happy with ESRI support. When I do finally talk to someone, they do resolve it quickly, but the act of getting to that point takes way too much time.
This is what needs to happen in my opinion.
I’ve never used EDN as I am not a developer, but I’m sure you could apply my suggestions to it also.
I’ve never had any problem with ESRI support or their forums. ESRI is a wonderful company to work with.
Frank, you got to be kidding me.
EDN has been of no value to us. We are partly to blame because we thought it was similar to MSDN, but it seems like it really is just a developer license program, not real developer support.
EDN’s last code example dates from July 9th. It is almost like they put the site up and abandoned it. I had high hopes for it.
ArcView User,
Why? ESRI support has been wonderful. Our city has never had any trouble with it.
ESRI should pull your blog off of the EDN page. If you don’t like ESRI then leave, don’t come to the Developer Summit and stop posting about ESRI.
I just got off the phone with ESRI. It took a while to talk to them, but they did resolve it quickly.
I guess you’d say I’m somewhat satisfied.
Get off your high horse James. If you don’t like it then don’t use ArcView. I’m just a student, but ArcView is wonderful and very powerful. I hope ESRI kicks you out for talking about them like this.
I’ve had mixed results with ESRI support. Some times it is quick but other times it is like getting your teeth pulled. Stanley Cooper has some good ideas.
I’m not sure why anyone is attacking James over this. He’s done more for GIS in the past 6 months than almost anyone else. ESRI should hire him to help them with internet marketing and interenet support. He’s been nothing but a champion for GIS professionals everywhere.
I’ve had pretty bad luck with ESRI support being response as we have very tight deadlines. They are very good, but slow.
I too want to let James know how much I appreciate his posts. I think GIS Professionals need to stick together. Keep up the great work and hopefully ESRI will respond to you.
Thanks for the kind words Steve and Lindy.
I doubt we’ll hear much back on ESRI on this. I can count the times they’ve “officially” responded to any of my posts on one hand.
This is a still a free country, right? James has the right to say whatever he wants about ESRI – it’s his blog. God forbid we actually question a private software company that supplies us with a product that we pay good money for.
Personally, after a couple of fruitless attempts at receiving customer support from ESRI, I stopped relying on that particular resource long ago. I have, however, been VERY curious about testing out Manifold. I’ve heard nothing but good things about it so far.
I’m sorry, but has ESRI support ever been good? I mean, their technology is cool and their developers rock, but their support?
I’m not using ESRI software much anymore, but I cut my teeth on it in the early 90’s. I still remember how many times I contacted support about the Digital Unix or PC Arc/Info platforms, just to have to find a workaround myself… which they happily plugged into their knowledge base… which was not publically available.
Jason
As to Manifold… I have a license and, for $250, it’s pretty decent software. I just can’t get used to the copy/paste paradigm that they used.
I find myself using it as a last resort, if FME or GDAL can’t do it and the copy of ArcView I have shared access to either isn’t available or doesn’t include the feature at that level.
I’ve managed to go from command-line to GUI, so I guess that I might be able to get used to it if I gave it a shot.
Jason
ESRI support has been really bad. I’m lucky enough to have some GIS contractors that help me out. One time all that ws required was to delete the normal.mxt template. ESRI wanted me to uninstall and reinstall ArcGIS. If anyone is familiar with NMCI, you’ll know that request would take months. My consultants figured it out in 10 seconds.
I will say Navy has standardized on ArcGIS so I don’t have any choice but use it. I’ve been thinking of looking into Autocad Map as we have tons of CAD support around here.
We use Google as well for ESRI tech support – or we find our own workarounds – they help out with installation problems (which are at an all-time high it seems), though they are a bit condescending for that. Overall – they aren’t terribly useful, I’m afraid. We are a University with several departments using the software.
I’ll sum it up this way.
Calling ESRI support is a last resort. Even though we pay thousands of dollars for maintenance, we only do this for software reasons, not support.
EDN is not worth it at all. We did purchase it to get ArcGIS Engine, but I think we’ll stick with MapObjects for now. We won’t be renewing next year, that is for certain.
The Dev Conference looks interesting, but I’m worried about it being worth traveling across the country. We’ll have to see what they offer.
Great blog James!
I’m so tired of ESRI support and the lack of online help they offer.
Don’t get me started on ESRI support. I could write a book on how bad it is. I sometimes get some good people, but generally it is very disapointing.
Our poor IT guys just freeze up when they have to call ESRI support. They have to go through the same beginner stuff every time. I wish there was some “higher level” support that you could just skip through the entry questions (did you reboot, delete the normal.mxt, etc…).
All I can tell that EDN does is change the color from green to red. There isn’t anything different than the normal site.
I appreciate the effort, but EDN hasn’t become anything. ESRI developers are second class citizens.
It’s really gratifying to see that as a whole I am not the only one who is dissatified with there support. My issues always seem to go to DSG and it takes on average atleast 3 days to get a call back, then I will be exchanging data back and forth till either I get fed up or they point in the general direction, never a absolute answer; but closer that I was.
For the 30+ grand a year you pay in maintanence you should get better support. Atleast on MSDN I get a reply from a MS person on the newsgroups that same day to start.
What a great thread, thanks James!
I too have been very dissipoted about support over the past year. ESRI tech support makes me feel like an idiot sometimes. I guess it really depends on who I talk to as some are very helpful, but the website should be dumped.
I don’t use ESRI support. Google is the only way to go.
I didn’t get involved with EDN, but it really is poor. I’ve seen some good posts by Brian Golden on his blog, but I can only assume ESRI is keeping him from implementing things.
The best development community website I’ve seen is http://www.java.net/ by Sun. If ESRI could do that it would be superb.
We’ve been thinking of moving from ESRI to open source because of the lack of response from ESRI as of late. We’ve been using Mapserver on some sites and have been very impressed with the product and the support we have received.
If one compares ESRI tech support to Microsoft or Sun, you really seen how poor it is especially given the amount of money everyone has invested in it.
I can’t tell you how many threads I’ve posted to the forums and have had no response. A post to the mapserver email list gets responses within minutes many times. It is depressing dealing with ESRI support as of late.
Last time I did a search on EDN a couple months ago for .NET support, the search returned only Java results. At that point I gave up and went to Google and have not been back.
I can’t figure out the logic behind the ESRI site. Things are not intuitive. I haven’t called ESRI support because I’m more of an internet email kind of guy. Google search is a big help as is this blog.
I can’t call ESRI support as I don’t even have a clue what my customer number is, so I try and do everything on the website.
I’ll echo others who have said the support website is too hard to use or even find things.
We’ve dropped ArcGIS as of version 9 and moved to Autodesk Map 3D anad have been very happy with the support.
We had tons of trouble with 9.0 and we never felt like we had good response from ESRI. When the maintenance came due, we couldn’t justify paying it so we went to Autodesk.
I’ve always felt there was a wall around ESRI that users were not allowed inside. You feel lonely out there.
Thanks James for having your blog and Planet Geospatial. I don’t feel quite alone anymore.
I’m a small plotter reseller and I’ve never felt like ESRI cared about my business. They have some partners, but if you aren’t one, then they spit on you. Their websites seem to be all bright and sunny, but underneath it is scarey.
How come I’m a business partner, but ESRI competes against me?
I don’t think you’ll ever get invited back to the ESRI campus after this James
Or they might beat you up at the Developer Conference, if they even allow you to go anymore.
You think ESRI would do that to James considering how much he’s been an evangelist for them?
I mean he’s the “ESRI Blogger”…
I’m not sure why they would be angry with James, all he said was support has gone down. We’ve been more harsh than he has.
Boy, I’d hate to think they would push him away.
ESRI is probably writing down all your names and going to put a red mark on your permanent record.
boy this thread has taken off. I don’t see any response from ESRI on it.
“I don’t see any response from ESRI on it.”
You won’t, ESRI might have responded before it took off, but not now.
I suspect James will get blacklisted. I’m this post is being sent out to all ESRI employees with instructions not to talk to him.
Face it James, ESRI will never speak to you again. Consider yourself unwelcome at all ESRI functions.
I hope they don’t do anything to James. He’s their biggest supporter on the internet.
Have you heard anything James?
GIS Dev:
No I have not and I don’t expect to hear anything on this blog.
Are you still planning to go to the Developer Summit?
Yes, I’ve just put in my paperwork with my company for both the Dev Summit and the BP Conference. I will be there and every GIS developer should too.
Well I might just go to hang out with you. We should do a blogger meetup there.
Oh you can be sure we’ll have a party.
At worst we’ll get a 12 pack and go drink in the desert!
Oh cool! I’m going to the summit now.
Good, bad, or indifferent; with this many people mad at them you have to wonder how they sell so much software.
My company is an ESRI Biz partner and it will continue. It is simple for us really as high dollar software means high dollar support from my company and more consultant hours down the road.
Yah, if James did hear anything from them it would only be to the tune of “Why are you creating a forum for all of this unwanted negative feedback?”
As for the Blacklist, it takes more than hosting a flamewar about ESRI to get hosed, you have to do something like blast one of there consulting projects. And they won’t admit to any list, but your Purchase Orders will all get lost, and your CustomerNumber will get cross-referenced to someone who hasn’t paid maint in over a decade so your shippments dissapear. Nothing overt, but nothing you can change either…
I’ve heard from a couple ESRI employees over the past day since I posted this.
I don’t want the fact that there are tons of very helpful ESRI staff out there that have helped me over the years and continue to help me. This isn’t some kiss up to mitigate the bitch session here, but the truth.
I’m sure most of the people who have posted about bad ESRI tech support can say the same thing as I did above. The official channels are clogged, but the unofficial ones are superb and those are ones that ESRI needs to help facilitate.
Very well said James. I’m looking forward to meeting you at the Developer Summit.
I love your blog James. An interesting thread for sure.
I won’t be there for the Developer Summit, but I’ll be in Palm Springs for the Business Partner Conference. I hope we’ll be able to do a meetup for that too.
Sure, I’d love to have another meetup for the Business Partner Conference. When we get closer to the time we can all figure out what works.
Ha, see ESRI did remove you from the EDN site.
http://edn.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=uc.gateway
So I guess they are going to freeze you out James.
Sad to hear you’ve been banned from EDN James. I’ve always thought you’ve been a great resource to the GIS community.
ESRI banned James? Why, he didn’t do anything wrong.
You’re OK in my book.
I’m not surprised. We’ve got 80 posts pretty much calling ESRI out. I’ve seen no ESRI employee blog about this so I can only assume they are freezing him out.
Too bad because I was looking forward to learning more about ArcGIS Explorer and ArcWeb Explorer. Guess that won’t happen now.
Wow, ESRI banned James from their site. I’m shocked and saddened.
Guys. I did not get banned, or reprimanded or frozen out of anything (at least that I know of).
I can still log into EDN and no ESRI employee I’ve talked to today has said anything about be being on a blacklist. I’ll still post about ArcGIS Explorer, ArcWeb and anything else interesting ESRI releases.
Lets not get carried away here and start rumors that have no basis of fact. This isn’t a soap opera.
Glad to hear you are still able to use ESRI products. I can’t believe how large this thread has gotten and how many people read you blog.
ESRI support is extremely poor. When we call we get one of the standard answers usually after a week or two of waiting.
I’m sorry we can’t reproduce the problem you and others on the forums mention so we’ll have to close the ticket.
Unfortunately, this is a known bug logged as CQ0999876587 with no work around. Would you like me to log your comments and close the incident?
This functionality is not available in ArcWhatever would you like me to log this as an enhancement request for our developers?
For #2 and #3 I have incidents over 2 and half years old with no answer. ESRI support is a horrible and cruel joke. I do want to say I’ve had some helpful ESRI staff that stuck through with me on some problems but once we reached the “wall” of passing it to the ESRI developers, we were done making progress.
On paper our GIS section is a 100% ESRI shop with our yearly maintenance to ESRI being well over six figures. In the real world we are evaluating Mapserver and the newly released “MapServer Enterprise “Tux”” along with working with Oracle Spatial to eliminate ArcIMS and ArcSDE and just retain ArcGIS Desktop.
Jack needs to read these posts and understand his users frustration because ESRI is no longer the only GIS show in town and my CIO will have no problem following my recommendations that have Autodesk and Oracle in them.
And as for the people that are saying how dare you badmouth ESRI support they should look at the number of posts and realize this has touched a raw nerve with many customers. They should thank you for exposing it, so if ESRI chooses they can treat their customers better before they leave.
“You guys should just use open source. Screw proprietary software!”—Left by ArcView User on December 15th, 2005
This had to be posted by OGC!
My thoughts:
ArcObjects First off, I’m glad I have a system like ArcObjects to work with. Sure it’s got it’s issues, but really, it’s got a whole lot more functionality in there than anything else out there. Not to say that the open source gang is not catching up in terms of functional GIS, but there are not even close to a unified COM/.NET/Java API like ArcObjects. And some support issues are not going to make me think twice about choosing another platform. That said, we are consultants, so if the end users change, we will follow.
ERSI Developer Network As far as EDN goes, it’s a godsend for consulting groups like ours. We typically have 2-3 medium size projects and one big kahuna project in the office. To support this sort of development, we need to have 3 or 4 SDE’s, running with different platforms and versions, multiple ArcIMS’s and multiple ArcGIS Servers. For the price, it’s the best deal for us. The only thing I’d like added to it would be developer versions of Desktop – it’s not like we do any production “gis” work, but it would be nice to not have to pay for full seats when they are just used by our clients to test the apps via Citrix prior to deployment.
ESRI Developer Support My only real beef with ESRI support is that without going to DSG, the only “developer support” is for VBA. And the last time I looked into it DGS was a little spendy for what usually results in “Yes, you have found bug CQ394849″. What would be really helpful would be to able to search the known bugs list from your EDN account. I realize that no company wants to air their dirty laundry (or dirty code in this case), but it would be one way to placate a lot of developers. This may also cut down on the support load, as many times people can find the known issue, add their 2 cents to it, and never interact with the support staff – leaving them able to deal with solvable problems.
I think that some posts in this thread illustrate the mindset and general nature of the brainwashed, GIS ==ESRI crowd (Kristina Howard seems to be the the poster child in this case). How can you expect much of a “community” from a company like ESRI? Its akin expecting a community to form around wallmart, or costco. I find it rather offensive that huge sums of tax payer money are directly siphoned into ESRI’s pockets- without this side benefits of a stellar product or technical support. As was mentioned up thread – if you want to see active, and more importantly prouductive developer communites check out those for Mapserver, GRASS, QGIS, and the R-Project , just to name a few.
At first I was angry when i got our EDN and saw what it really was. But if you treat it as a way to get development licenses of software it really isn’t too bad. I think the name confuses people more than anything.
I can’t say I’m unhappy with ESRI. I’ve had some issues in the last year, but nothing to get too worked up about. I do think support isn’t as good as it used to be, but it isn’t useless as others have said.
I would really like a 24 hour service. Wednesday night I was up at 2:00 AM trying to resolve a problem that occurred when creating a new ArcIMS Web Service on a production machine. Tech support closed hours ago and would not open for several more hours; well after my users would be back in the office and trying to use a system that was down. Being able to call a 24 hour support line would have been nice.
Luckily I was able to fix things before people started showing up to work, but only after staying up most of the night.
I just came across this thread and I have to disagree to an extent- Recently we were dealing with some issues involving developing a WFS service atop a legacy Oracle application. We were trying to make the data residing inside the application and associated databases available to EPA GIS analysts in support of Hurricane Katrina response and remediation. The problem we had involved GML formatting and schemas for use in Data Interoperability Extension- We found Vasu and the others at ESRI to be extremely responsive and helpful, and they also put us in touch with their counterparts at Safe Software, to help resolve some of the technical issues we had. The application was deployed within a few days.
Three words: Manifold, Manifold, Manifold. We made the switch last year and haven’t looked back. The product is great, very affordable, and more modern than ESRI. There is a great community of users who are enormously helpful, and some 3rd party training has popped up. For $245 you get a full fledged GIS (with all the topology tools), and an IMS. Plus, its all integrated into Microsoft, so it talks well with other applications.
Maybe you are all not using the latest version. They always tell me to use latest version. WE are now on 9.2 Beta 2. Guess waht it still does not work. You are the support. You are the tester. The money you pay ESRI goes to fill Jack’s Pockets
Manifold simply rocks. I’ve been using it for 4 years now and I have got to say that their development cycle and their response to users’ requests is simply amazing. Version 7 is due out quite soon. Despite it being a serious upgrade, it is free to current users of 6.50. There is a brief writeup of it (by a Cornell professor who teaches it in his courses) on Directions Magazine http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=2170&trv=1
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[...] The deluge of comments about ESRI support that hijacked James Fee’s MapServer Enterprise post brought back memories of OZRI. I heard several animated conversations among delegates complaining about technical support, and value for maintenance dollars. [...]