I love email. It’s still my one source for communication. It’s my one big source of communication for QGIS interaction. Second is probably google hangout.
I try to be as active as I can be on the QGIS users listserve. I tell everyone that takes a class to subscribe. Some do. You learn a lot from being on it. Some of the stuff you learn has nothing to do with plugins or editing. You learn about bugs, struggles from users, and things people are doing.
A fairly long thread started the other day here:
I am using QGIS in a single stand-alone situation and I was wondering what
examples there are of medium to large corporations using QGIS as their GIS
platform and what issues you need to be aware of in large multi-user QGIS
situations?
The conversation grew:
in Italy many large administrations are using QGIS on hundreds of
installation. No special issue that I know of. Install on some
environments (e.g. Citrix) has proved a bit tricky, but worked well.
Some of them have developed a portable installer for users without admin
rights. AFAIK they are happy with that.
It kept Growing:
I am administering a QGis LTR 2.14 installation for 50 users on a Citrix Windows 7 networked environment using OSGeo4W, using OSGeo4W and Oracle as our database. We have been productive since Qgis 2.8. We started testing at Qgis 1.8. My users press All The Buttons, so I feel like I’ve run into just about every problem there is.
It got a bit bigger:
We ( as in the municipality of Frederikssund, Denmark) has a medium size
enterprise installation of Qgis 2.8 at around 100 local installations of
Qgis 2.8 in a Windows-7 64 bit environment. There is no significant
problems with this installation.
Out of the last Conversation I learned that Frederikssund has posted their install instructions on Github. From that I’ve been reading and I need to do some experimentation – but more or less you can do one install of QGIS, Get it “right” , and then move that one install to everyone. Install once then migrate it out. I’m not a windows admin – but it looks straightforward. So I’m going to give it a shot this weekend to see if I can follow along.
The other take away – QGIS works as GIS Desktop Software. This isn’t something you use when you can’t afford ArcGIS. I catch some flack from different parts of my working peers about my devotion to open source. I have to remind them I’m mostly a GIS guy – I just have a lot of Open Source tools I like working with. I like my commercial software also. I do support for people with QGIS installs and in two cases this might make their life and life a lot easier. Onward to testing. Hopefully this helps come of you out who never saw the email exchange.
