What applications and workflow(s) do you use for gathering, displaying and storing GPS data, with your centralised corporate data, for people who are not GIS folk?
We're in the process of standardizing across all branch offices and I'd like to hear what other folks are doing. While we have GIS users there is a significant and growing number of staff who are not and will never be GIS practitioners but are nevertheless called upon to work with spatial data. Putting Arcmap on the desktop is too expensive in time and training let alone dollars, which also knocks Quantum GIS and friends out of the running.
Google Earth is certainly easy to use and the latest versions import GPS data with a minimum of fuss. GE doesn't work for us because their base imagery in our area is so poor it doesn't line up with GPS data by tens of metres and there is no facility to replace their base with our own. Also the GE elevation model is poor and the GPS tracks disappear beneath the ground unless one discards the GPS elevation on import.
The free ArcReader solves admirably the problem of fast and easy geo browsing with custom base data — provided the central agency has ArcPublisher, which we do — but there is no means of easily dropping GPS data on top.
Garmin now has the free Basecamp, but there doesn't seem to be an easy means of getting the GPS data out of Basecamp and into our central data repository (unless I've missed something?).
So how about it, what do you do?
UPDATE:At the moment the primary use case is for field staff (water license inspectors, conservation officers, wildlife biologists) to collect points and tracks in the field, bring them back to the office, overlay on our in-house base data, pan/zoom/browse/etc., do the odd Identify query, export as bitmap or wmf to include in a report, and save the GPS data somewhere in an ArcGIS accessible format.
We, the real GIS folk, pick up the GPS data from the drop box and stuff it into a proper geodatabase for shared corporate use, after the appropriate data massage is complete.
Best Answer
Colleagues of mine once had a similar task: "Create a tool that allows the user to overlay satellite imagery with polygon data from PostGIS and offer them easy ways to classify the polygons. (Minimal training necessary)" ... They used QGIS, hid away all unnecessary tools and toolbars, added buttons and keyboard shortcuts for classification, done.
I think you could do the same. Hide all unnecessary tools and probably even load the background map on program start. The user just needs to be taught how to use GPS Tools to import their data. There are functions for saving bitmaps and exporting GPS data into all kinds of formats.