What are some best practices for using a GIS to keep track of property boundaries, point data, PDFs, and drawings?
We do boundary surveys, topos, route surveys, and construction layout.
We use Carlson's Civil Suite and QGIS.
We have all of our projects in Google Earth. I'm not an expert on it so I don't know how they did it but when GE is opened on any workstation there are pins @ each site we've worked. They're even color coded by department: civil, survey, bridge, marine, entertainment. The only function in Carlson GIS we in survey use is the "Place Image by Worldfile" which is great as NY has a super high resolution ortho database that's free and uses the .jw2 format so there is no converting of files. Great help when drafting a job you weren't on-site for.
I Use the Carlson GIS module in the Civil Suite to link entities to my database, which is MS Access. That's the only "weak link" in it, I would prefer to use some other database engine but I'm kinda stuck with it now, I guess, since I started out with it.
If I were starting out fresh again, I would try to do something different there with that.
I have played with QGIS a little, but the Carlson GIS works fine for me and allows me to store my spatial entities in a common format, autocad dwg. I suppose you could do similar with QGIS, but linking entities might be a little clunky, but I'm guessing about that.