RS2 vs. Surfer

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
RS2
Score 6.8 out of 10
N/A
Rocscience offers RS2, an engineering application for the oil and gas industries that build models of rock and soil, steady-state finite element groundwater seepage analysis, and other analyses.N/A
Surfer
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Surfer is a data visualization suite from Golden Software in Colorado for oil and gas companies, or other entities in other industries requiring geological or environmental data.N/A
Pricing
RS2Surfer
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
RS2Surfer
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
User Ratings
RS2Surfer
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(1 ratings)
9.5
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
6.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
RS2Surfer
Likelihood to Recommend
Rocscience
RS2 is well suited if you are looking for a system that allows you to control and monitor access to your buildings to keep them secure. It provides good visibility of the current status of doors and also allows you to set alarms to notify you of various events. RS2 also gives you the flexibility to set local administrators that only control doors at their location.
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Golden Software
Surfer has been excellent for us, a small company, to process the electrical resistivity, refraction microtremor, and MASW data collected in the field. There are an increasing number of programs capable of assisting in this geophysical analysis but Surfer is the most advanced. The ability to create both 2D and 3D figures in the program while managing data is a huge help. It also greatly improved report quality and helped clients better understand what the results were for a study.
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Pros
Rocscience
  • RS2 gives you a good view of the current status of your doors from the RS2 Access It! application.
  • It allows you to assign permissions to admin users, so you can restrict them to only seeing the doors at their location. You can also restrict the modules they see and whether they can view, edit, and delete.
  • The system allows you to schedule door activities through timezones (i.e., set door x to unlocked from 8:00 am until 8:15 am Monday through Friday) to automate door activities.
  • The Event Listing report is configurable and allows you to see an individual user, groups of users, a single door, groups of doors, a specific flag (i.e., access granted, access denied, timezone activated, etc).
  • You can program macros to set ad hoc door activities.
  • The system allows you to import a building map marking all of the doors with access readers. You can also carry out ad hoc activities from the access readers on the map (i.e., set door to unlocked for x minutes, set door to unlocked until x o'clock, etc).
  • It has flexible inputs that we integrate with other notification systems for doing lock down from a panic button, so all doors lock when the button is activated.
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Golden Software
  • The interface is simple and easy/quick to learn, so that not much experience is needed to start generating maps.
  • The map layouts are easy to manipulate, change colors, scale, labels, contour interval, etc...
  • Simple but functional mathematical and logical functions allow for the calculation and manipulation of grids.
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Cons
Rocscience
  • The reporting is somewhat customizable, but not easy to work with. Most of the pre-packaged reports have been useless to us.
  • One of the biggest drawbacks is that the schedule does not use a calendar, so if you set and automated event for Monday through Friday, it is every Monday through Friday. There is a way to set a holiday to prevent an automated schedule from running on a certain day, but it is not easy to work with. A calendar view with exceptions would be much better.
  • On rare occasion, if one of the controllers has their network connection briefly disrupted, they do not come back online until we power cycle the controller. The doors still maintain their security, but you cannot make any changes or updates until you power cycle.
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Golden Software
  • The user interface can be tricky at first. It's a little rough around the edges and takes a little time to get the hang of.
  • Not an ideal application for older employees. There are too many things with the interface that make it not worthwhile to train employees with less computer experience.
  • Manipulating data within Surfer is difficult because you have to do things in a certain order. Not terrible if you get the hang of it but certainly frustrating at first.
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Support Rating
Rocscience
Their annual support renewal is very high compared to others and they will not provide any support without the contract. We tend to work through our re-seller for support. They are trained, but still need to contact RS2 support for some issues and even if they open a support case, RS2 will not talk directly with us. They have been able to resolve most issues, but still have not determined why certain controllers do not recover if there is a network disruption.
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Golden Software
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Rocscience
We compared RS2 to the Hirsh Identiv Velocity system. The Velocity system did not allow us to schedule door access easily and was difficult to integrate with other systems. The Velocity management interface was cumbersome and did not allow us the flexibility of scripting door settings. With Velocity it was not easy to monitor or make changes to door status.
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Golden Software
Surfer is very unique with respect to its capabilities. I am not aware of any other mapping software that is at the same time flexible, has a friendly interface, and creates such nice-looking maps.
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Return on Investment
Rocscience
  • It is hard to measure ROI because an access security system does not generate any revenue. It was implemented to secure our buildings and help protect students and staff.
  • It has positively impacted our business from a safety standpoint. It allows us to secure our buildings.
  • RS2 also integrates well with other systems to allow us to lock down our buildings in the event of a severe external threat.
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Golden Software
  • The worst thing about Surfer is the cost. My company can only afford one license at the moment which means only one employee gets to use it regularly. Not so great when someone is sick or you have a huge wave of projects.
  • The user interface is a little rough but younger employees have been great at catching on quickly and producing great images.
  • There's nothing else quite like Surfer. It's versatile and not to difficult to use so, though the licenses are expensive, it is an excellent program that has done wonders for our company!
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ScreenShots