ArcGIS

With enough time and interest, the features available for ArcGIS and ArcGIS Pro are brilliant and all-encompassing. Using raw map datums and a collection of information allows users to expertly display any sort of 2-d grid on any map projection with tons of custom options for audience display.

The learning curve is very steep and the complexity of the software is overwhelming to new users. The number of navigable menus and sub-menus in the home screen of the project can be exhausting to figure out without doing everything incorrectly the first time. This is NOT the Microsoft Powerpoint of data display.

ArcGIS continues to evolve as a product as our needs grow as a customer. We are moving away from desktop-based GIS, with nearly all employees now using mobile devices as their primary tool to access our utility mapping data. ArcGIS Online has made this available, and we continue to grow our mobile offerings, though the AGOL platform still allows us numerous areas for us to continue to explore and utilize to improve our field workflows.

Numerous samples, test applications, etc. are provided by ESRI to get you started, and since they're the industry leader, there are tons of real-world examples of the software in use that are available to the public.

ArcGIS is an enormously complex software platform, with tons of automation and analysis tools available. However online documentation can be difficult to find, and is frequently written in ways that require an in-depth understanding of the systems. Prerequisite setup steps aren't always included in the documentation, instead it's often written with some assumptions in mind. Setups completed by other employees can be difficult to troubleshoot because of these assumptions in the documentation.

The robustness of the platform can also lead to additional steps for end users, as they have to work through options that aren't relevent to them, but cannot be hidden from their view. One such example is just the login screen to the AGOL mobile apps causes our users frequent struggles as they can't remember the sequence of steps to get to the organization login. There should be increased administrator options available to simplify/restrict options available to the end user.