ArcGIS vs PolicyMap: Which is a better fit?

Amanda: I'm Amanda. I'm an asset manager. I score ArcGIS a four out of five. For more reviews like this, click below. We had ArcGIS for the last three and a half years. Before we used ArcGIS, we were using paper maps and knowhow from the local crew that we had on site. Unfortunately, once crew members leave or they're longer with us, they took the data and information with us. So ArcGIS was a great tool for us to be able to keep the data in-house and always available to every one of our employees. ArcGIS tools are great for functionality with other programs that we're already using. So because we also use two other software systems that are integrated with this particular system, it made it very easy to work with it and to use it in the field and in the office for everyone to work together and collaborate on. Getting started with ArcGIS was a little challenging at first because you have to make sure that you have database servers and everything can be handled very well. And we ended up, after about two years of having ArcGIS, the data overload was slowing down our original server so we had to get a second server. So I do recommend that if you are going to [inaudible 00:01:13] ArcGIS and do the mapping, depending on how much data you're going to be incorporating that you want to have a dedicated server for it, just the mapping softwares. But it works really well with that. We got through it. It was a little bit more difficult, but we had a great team to work with through Esri. They did a great job at helping us integrate between that and the other software company that we use, work orders. If you're thinking about getting ArcGIS, I recommend to get in as much training as you can. They have a lot of free training to get you understanding how it works. Go straight to ArcGIS Pro. Don't use the desktop because the Pro software is such easy to use. It's more user friendly, it's Window based software. It works really well. It's got the ribbons like Windows does. So it's very easy to use, very self-explanatory to figure things out. So I recommend that you do the trainings, go through a lot of it, work with your software managers to make sure that you understand how to use everything and just really use it to its full potential because they've got so many apps now and so many things you can do in the field with the software and it's very good software for that.