Comments on: Tell me again what GeoPDF does…

By: Melissa

Melissa — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 22:21:00 +0000

2 years later…GeoPDFs are still around. What’s your latest take on them?

By: Adam Estrada

Adam Estrada — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:37:14 +0000

@GeographicTrek: TerraGo’s focus is to create rich and usable GIS solutions based on the Adobe Platform. It always has been only now we are official business partners with Adobe. So, you may pay x dollars for an ArcGIS extension that will then give you the ability to use all the other tools and products that TerraGo offers. There are too many applications for this technology to mention…your 1 license to 500+ user example sounds pretty good to me! That is what this company has been providing for years now.

Other folks have commented on the ArcGIS Server license but what you get is an API that will allow you to customize the technology to fit in to your work flow. When you purchase a single seat of this particular product, you can deploy it as a web app or some other application that gets your data in to the hands of everyone on earth if need be. This is an extreme example but not impossible…

The direction that TerraGo is going is interesting because now the company/technology is able to leverage all the new or emerging Adobe technology like AIR and LiveCycle. I am actually sitting in a LiveCycle class right now so more on that later.

I have mentioned in an earlier post that each and every GIS professional out there who questions the technology should ask the sales team for a demo. Heck…go straight to a sales engineer who REALLY knows the technology. Scott Lee gave me a demo this week of a new example data set from Byron Georgia. This is a smaller city in southern Georgia who had a tremendous amount of geospatial data but no GIS. They were able to use TerraGo products to geo-register previously scanned in paper maps to PDF, import CAD data from what seemed to be an ancient version of Microstation, aerial photography, and dozens of photographs of key features that were taken with the Ricoh camera. Roads data and topos were also included in their final Map Book to make a single and seamless data set that could be accessed by anyone who needed it. This included emergency response, tax assessors, Police, Fire, etc…that’s slee@terragotech.com!

By: Alan Stewart

Alan Stewart — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 04:52:21 +0000

I’m an engineer, not a sales or marketing person. I have no involvement in pricing. I can tell you that writing an intelligent PDF writer as an ArcObjects component consumes considerably more engineering time than a dumb PDF writer based on a Microsoft printer driver. Comparing our ArcGIS product to one of those is an apple-to-orange comparison. Also, the market for ArcGIS products is considerably smaller than the general Windows market.

By: GeographicTrek

GeographicTrek — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:09:32 +0000

I bought the map2pdf bundle for arcgis 9.x v4 for $2k with a $400/yr maintenance fee. I imagine that TerraGo’s pricing structure has changed a lot recently based on Christopher Blough’s quote and what I paid.

There is no other mobile GIS/GPS application out there (and yes, the GPS works great for us and we are looking forward to the recording of tracks and routing) for so cheap! For a couple of field workers, there may be an option I’m not aware of that is cheaper, but a mobile GIS/GPS application using Adobe Reader, GeoPDFs, and GPS with the free GeoPDF Toolbar can’t be beat in cost.

I am extremely dissapointed in TerraGo’s customer service and business tactics and I really don’t like their product at all, but the field workers do and it is cheap compared to other alternatives. I am always looking for other options for similar or less $, so please let me know if you can help me!

I need a mobile GIS/GPS solution without licensing restrictions that can be utilized by potentially 500+ field workers at the same time, that only cost a few thousand $ total….any suggestions other than GeoPDF? I have tons of great GIS data, but need to disseminate it to hundreds of field workers who can also see where they are in relation to the map using GPS…anything out there other than GeoPDF that can do this for so cheap?? Please let me know!

Thanks

By: Christopher Blough

Christopher Blough — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:14:13 +0000

See post #40 for details on government pricing. This will give you some idea of what the product pricing range is at this time.

By: Lefty

Lefty — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:04:50 +0000

Huh? A pdf writer need not be expensive.

By: Righty

Righty — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:52:14 +0000

Do you really think you can buy a GIS solution for $50?! You can’t buy a tank of gas for $50!

By: Lefty

Lefty — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:20:38 +0000

So no prices without contacting sales folks?

By: Adam Estrada

Adam Estrada — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:15:06 +0000

@Everyone: Get in touch with TerraGo and set up a demo. Ask to see a full product demo to learn that its not just about GeoPDF, its about a pretty robust GIS solution. Also, check out these quick tutorials as they give a pretty good walk through of each product.

http://www.terragotech.com/support/tutorials.php

The latest release of Map2PDF for ArcGIS will be out soon as will the latest version of Map2PDF for Raster. There are a lot of improvements to both!

By: not unknown

not unknown — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:52:12 +0000

So what is it? I see no price anywhere. I’m pretty sure it isn’t $50, but is it $199? $250? $499?