Hi Moenk,
I figure another user's perspective might be appropriate.
I have been successfully using Geonetwork since 2009 in a production environment.
In 2008 the institute I work for participated in an international research initiative. Participation included the requirement to provide data, etc online. I selected Geonetwork as the tool to do this. We had no problems. At around 12:00PM on the day we started to actually implement it, I started looking for a suitable host, by 4:30PM I had a host & Geonetwork admin/support agreement in place.
Within a couple of days it was running, & I prepared a "HowTo" for our researchers to populate their metadata, which enabled staff to load metadata without ever contacting me regarding the system. It was commended as perhaps the best catalogue & metadata mgmt facility of all participants in the programme.
Since 2009 we have deployed several more instances. I have demonstrated a simple, very basic install & deployment from scratch, it can take well under an hour.
All our systems are using Postgis as the underlying database.
So my results are very different from yours. I agree, it is not easy to customise, is sensitive to the setup of dependencies, & requires a good level of technical expertise to run much more than a standard installation. but have found that once installed & configured, it is a robust & effective tool.
I also agree, compared with other Open Source project I work with regularly, the level of help provided on the list is not as good, but I'm also aware of a local agency who are using ESRI's Geoportal solution, and turning this into a viable production system appears much more difficult.
Given you are looking for a tool with good integration with Arc Catalog, did you not consider Geoportal as an option?
We are extensively harvesting catalogue records, between our own catalogues, between ours & national government catalogues, between ours and international catalogues, and generally (not always) configuring Geonetwork to support this has been relatively straightforward, and the developers have provided very useful assistance (notably Simon Pigot).
In addition to harvesting, we use a third party CSW client to embed a simpler client interface in our web sites for users to search & browse the Geonetwork catalogue. This has also worked reliably & effectively (& is also Open Source).
Successive versions have consistently introduced very useful & desirable capabilities, not always as quickly as we would have liked, but at least as quickly as most commercial vendors have enhanced their apps based on users requests, at least in my 30 years experience of such things.
One point, given the large numbeer of significant catalogues running Geonetwork, which never seem to have any recourse to the mailing list, my conclusion is that many users are indeed able to simply download, install & use Geonetwork without problems, or at least without asking there for assistance.
So while you & some others may have found Geonetwork does not provide a viable solution, my experience (& that of many others) has been very different. You also suggest that a Google search found other users finding problems much like yours. I would also suggest a Google search can easily find many viable institutional, national & international Geonetwork catalogues which are running reliably & effectively.
Cheers,
Brent Wood
--- On Wed, 11/28/12, moenk <moenkemt@anonymised.com> wrote:
From: moenk <moenkemt@anonymised.com>
Subject: [GeoNetwork-users] Fed up with GeoNetwork
To: geonetwork-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Date: Wednesday, November 28, 2012, 11:12 PM
Folks,
we tried to use GeoNetwork for a geo-spatial infrastructure in our project
for one year now. I'm really fed up with this software. Is there anybody out
there who is using it and is satisfied with it in a productive enviroment?
I have my doubts about this and you are welcome to show me a least one
working reference installation. Googling for installations of GeoNetwork
shows up several sites with the same problems I encountered the last year.
Problems starts with the Java/Tomcat-enviroment, you need to know how to
configure memory, editing files with the wrong editor might crash the whole
system. Simple changes to the XSL-based templates require a system restart.
PostGIS-support needs that you know the right howto and user need to find
out how it works. Fancy error messages in HTML from time to time and search
results that are not really useful.
At this time I do not dare to ask about a working up- and download of
geodata in ZIP-archives and indexing metadata and thumbnails that it to be
found in the wild, i.e. created by ArcCatalog.
A fews weeks ago I deteled all the Java/Tomcat-crap and started coding a
solution on my own, open source of course and available on GitHub, a simple
LAMP-thing coded in PHP. Users can upload geodata with metadata, provide
service-URLs or website-URLs, all done very simple, feel free to have a look
on gdi.geo.hu-berlin.de to get an impression how I think a GDI should work.
Thanks for the time here,
-moenk
-----
Geomatics Lab | Geography Department | Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin
web: http://www.geographie.hu-berlin.de
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