Share a qGIS sales territory database across a cloud based office

Question

The business I work for has a network of dealers across America. Dealers are assigned ZIP codes. When we have a potential dealer, we would like to create a new territory for them and integrate it into our database which has demographics, leads, and sales. I have figured out how to do this on qGIS on my desktop.

As we are a small company, we:

1. don't have the resources to buy ESRI software, and
2. don't have a server in the first place as we share everything off of google drive.

We would like to be able to share the dealer territory map and accompanying database so that several employees can access and edit it at anytime anywhere without having to always reload and unzip the source files.

We have all this data in Google Fusion as well, but we need a platform that allows spatial analytics (i.e. buffers), thus why I chose qGIS.

Any suggestions for us so we can avoid buying costly sales territory software?

Answer 1

As we are a small company, we don't have the resources to buy ESRI software, and don't have a server in the first place

This is gonna sound like a sales pitch for Esri, but promise I have no affiliation with them ;)

You could look at using ArcGIS Online to collaborate easily between multiple offices. The pricing model doesn't require expensive server software, as most of what you need to view and edit the datasets is hosted in Esri's cloud. You would pay per user, and for storage if you end up creating huge datasets.

If you do need to perform any shapefile analysis or creation, you could always use QGIS.

ArcGIS Online may not solve your requirements but it may be worth at least considering. It's free to sign up for a developer license to test it.