By David Crowther
In the past when working for organisations whose GIS architecture was locked into single vendor contracts, the use of additional plugin tools was often limited. This was mainly due to plugins either requiring additional expertise/training to utilise them or often because their cost was prohibitive. This meant that undertaking more complex GIS tasks such as point to point routing, 3D analysis and web mapping was often expensive and limited to those staff who had access to the restricted licenses.
