To echo William Porter and Shawn Lewers, I am an occasional user of ERSI products and have been very impressed by ESRI's support staff. They are very knowledgeable and have always been able to answer my most technical questions. This is a major selling point. But it also is one that can't be quantified in dollars and is therefore often difficult to express to bureaucrats. For my purposes, the price of the product is seldom the deciding factor. This amount is usually insignificant in comparison with considerations of project delays dealing with technical problems (which always arise) which in turn lead to missed deadlines and additional costs in personnel time. This is why free products are usually worth exactly what you pay for them. --Dan Schwartz ************************************************************************ Dr. Daniel G. Schwartz Office 850-644-5875 Dept. of Computer Science, MC 4530 CS Dept 850-644-4029 Florida State University Fax 850-644-0058 Tallahassee, FL 32306-4530 schwartz@cs.fsu.edu U.S.A. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~schwartz ************************************************************************ "Shawn Lewers" wrote: > Correction- I would agree with DeAndre, Melisa, and William. > Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry® > > -----Original Message----- > From: "Shawn Lewers" > Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2011 14:11:00 > To: DeAndrae Spradley; Shrug-l-Bounces; Shrug-L > Reply-To: slewers@fsu.edu > Subject: Re: shrug-l: ArcGIS Alternative > > I would agree with Melissa and her assessment. You can use Qgis to provide a gui interface with grass or at least you could last time I looked at it about 5 years ago. In an enterprise environment you are probably better off with esri unless you have some good programmers. Also esri provides a fair amount of support that save me loads of time when there is a problem. > Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry® > > -----Original Message----- > From: DeAndrae Spradley > Sender: shrug-l-bounces@lists.dep.state.fl.us > Date: Tue, 05 Apr 2011 05:46:06 > To: shrug-l > Subject: Re: shrug-l: ArcGIS Alternative > > _______________________________________________ > SHRUG-L mailing list > SHRUG-L@lists.dep.state.fl.us > http://lists.dep.state.fl.us/mailman/listinfo/shrug-l > > > -- > This message has been scanned for viruses and > dangerous content by MailScanner, and is > believed to be clean. >