Or so says Wilson County Sheriff’s Office and the Wilson Police Department (North Carolina) in an article published on Thursday, April 19, 2007 by the WilsonTimes.
[Sheriff Wayne] Gay said his deputies have had nothing but problems with the system and a hard time getting anyone to correct them.
“They have not delivered anything in over three years,” Gay said.
“It was working great in Florida,” [Wilson Police Chief Harry] Tyson said. “We just can’t get it to work here.”
Tyson would like the city and county to purchase another program that would do the things that SmartCOP was supposed to do.
This was quoted directly from the article. You can read the whole story at: http://www.wilsondaily.com/Wil_region/Local_News/295012652083347.php
Well, I decided to do a little more research on the matter and pulled up the ole Google.com and performed a search for “SmartCOP”. I was not surprised to see that the first listing was the company’s website (the company being CTS-America). Apparently the company’s name is CTS-America and they carry a line of software products that are branded with a “SmartCOP” naming scheme including a SmartCAD, SmartRMS, SmartJAIL, etc. as listed on their home page.
Well right there on the main page was a link to “News” so I gave it a click. The latest story was dated October 11, 2006 and had something to do with the Highlands County Sheriff’s Office getting SmartCOP software on laptops installed to the tune of more than $440, 000.00. Wow. There was an associated link to a media site, The Tampa Tribune. The link to the actual story… missing. Yep, error 404, nobody’s home. So I performed a search on the site and could not find anything on tbo.com for smartcop.
Ok, next story. Something in August of last year about somebody else buying their software. Oh, wait a minute… here’s something: FHP traffic Web site gets Google-ized. That sounds pretty interesting. They provided a service that integrates FHP traffic crash data with latitude and longitude on a Google Map. That’s pretty darn cool. I hope they held on to the programmer that worked on that project. 
Well, onward and upward. I searched for nearly an hour and really could not find any recent articles about the company. Apparently the world does not have that much to say about SmartCOP in the last year. Most of the articles I was able to dig up were from at least two years ago (all positive by the way).
So what does it all mean, Jonathan? Well, I myself know a little something about software. Even the big boys that create some of the best software in the world, Apple, Inc. (Public, NASDAQ:AAPL) have people that complain about them. What’s that you say? Oh, you thought I was going to say the “M” word? Alright, yes I agree Microsoft Corporation (Public, NASDAQ:MSFT) is king when it comes to dominating the software (at least the home pc OS) market. But who knows… Vista may just be annoying enough to change all of that!
BTW - Don’t you just love those Get a Mac Ads? I know I do.
So is SmartCOP a crappy software company? I don’t know… well I have some opinions, but I won’t share them here. 
Read the articles, visit their website and do some research. Make up your own mind. And if you don’t really care then why the heck did you read the whole article?
You failed to mention that you worked for this comany in a previous life. You were one of the lead engineers responsible for the product that you are now commenting about.
Pot said what to kettle?
You caught me! That is true, I was a lead engineer at CTS-America and I learned quite a bit there. I left the company of my own free will to pursue other opportunities.
The reason I wrote the article from that standpoint is I wanted to be objective. In fact all of the searches that I performed about the company were done intentionally without any of my prior company knowledge. I used only the company’s name and the information that I found in the original article cited to do the research. This was just an experiment to explore the “what if” I were in the market for public safety software and were trying to find out more.
I’m sorry if I stepped on any toes over there. I have no gripes with the SmartCOP software. In fact I helped write some of it (or at least maintain and modify it). In the South East US it is probably one of the best and widely used public safety suites in the marketplace.
And just so you know, event though you don’t leave your email or name… your IP is still a trace of you. Reverse DNS baby. I see you!