Before I joined WeoGeo, I worked at a company that used Microsoft SharePoint to facilitate sharing between themselves and their clients.  Now while SharePoint does have its good point, sharing spatial datasets is not one of them.  One project that clearly demonstrated this failing was one that consisted of sharing GIS files from different parts of the country.  You can imagine how this was organized, the classic SharePoint folder system, a folder named after the state had folders with names of the counties and in some cases names of cities.  So if you knew the state and county of the dataset, you could find it.

Of course the PM for the project on the client side wasn’t as familiar with the data as we were.  She needed a ton of help because you can imagine how easy it was to keep all those counties of Texas strait.  She knew the area she wanted to get results from, but she didn’t explicitly know the name of the county.  Plus this folder organization was difficult because she couldn’t grab data from an area all at once.  One would navigate to the county folder and download datasets.  Then navigate back up to the state level and grab the next county.  Since these counties were organized in alphabetical order, it didn’t really make the process easy. (more…)