Thoughts About the ESRI Support Thread
Well it seems to have calmed down. I’m not sure what happened, but it seems like I hit a nerve with the post, which was not my intention (I was actually posting about Mapguide, but hey what are you going to do). I got an email from someone in the press who wanted my thoughts about this thread which was interesting. I’ve posted again and again about the problems with EDN, ArcScripts and the support wait times. There isn’t anything new in this last post that I haven’t posted about before so if you want my thoughts about ESRI, you have a whole blog here to go off of (and yes half the posts contradict the other half).
I agree that your post wasn’t totally out of the blue. Maybe people just needed a little holiday season catharsis.
Though I’m not usually keen on vendor quotes, this one from Autodesk has a ring of truth to it even though it doesn’t mention ESRI by name. I think you previous entry just shows that a lot of people are no longer buying into the fact that ESRI needs to be the end solution for everything GIS. Without competitive pressure I fear that nothing will force ESRI to change. Our organization bought into the full ESRI solution because it should have made life easier getting everything to work. With the problems with ESRI support and the new release of software having problems the original versions didn’t, this has not turned out to be true for us.
“Some software vendors put a lock on your valuable data by clinging to expensive and outdated GIS systems and spatial databases. Don’t restrict your spatial information to all but a handful of vendor-specific GIS software tools. Liberate your data and unlock the true potential of GIS.”
http://www.autodesk.com/gis
once again, perfect clipart
FWIW, I use the EDN search all the time. There was a point in Oct where it was definitely busted but when I contacting Brian G., he let me knew what was wrong (something about the indexing crawler they were using), that they were on the problem and that it would be fixed. It was fixed and now I’m on it pretty much every day. YMMV.
also, unlike some of the other commentors, I think there is lots of information in the forums. The questions that usually do not get answered are vague or in the category of “do my work for me” questions. Patience and search skills can find you a treasure trove and FWIW, I find the same skills are needed when searching the web with Google/Usenet.
I’d be interested to see how much better it is in the open source world but I doubt that if everyone went in that direction the quality could be sustained. One of the other commentors from “the post” said that you could get access to the main developers whenever you wanted but increase that persons availability tenfold and its clear he would never be able to work one on one with everyone, it’s just not possible.
also, that Autodesk quote smacks of marketing. I’d love to see a real point for point comparison before they call ArcGIS “outdated”, that’s just ridiculous.
(fyi - I mistakenly posted this in an older thread originally)
Cheers to that Brian.
I too use the ESRI forums all the time. The EDN site also has some great examples/tutorials for ArcGIS server.
We run Oracle here. Submitting a tar to Oracle is always the last resort (the same comments from “the post” apply to Oracle). Do we give up because we get stuck? No way. Just like ESRI, there is a treasure trove of help/tutorials/examples/websites out on the web–both by Oracle and your average Joe user/developer.
I have always thought that ESRI would benefit from someone like AskTom from the Oracle side. Tom Kyte is a senior architect at Oracle but he answers thousands of questions a month from everyday users. He does not replace support, but tries to answer “how to” questions. He is also not afraid to respond with RTFM.