Wireless Thus Paperless PDA

[jb-eye]

Written at the request of members:

Ok the kit comprises of:

1 A blue tooth mobile phone with GPRS enabled (we use 6310i)

2 A blue tooth PDA (we use Ipaq 1940 & 2210)

3 Co-pilot live (ALK technologies)

4 An ADSL server with a fixed IP address& firewall

The O2 XDA will do the same job as 1&2 above

The database we use is Alarm Master by PC data. Connection is Internet based using port forwarding through our firewall and over our network to our database server.

We force the Ipaq GPRS Internet connection by cradling the Ipaq (Alkron cradle with speech amplifier & charger) this is achieved whenever co-pilot is connected. The first thing to happen is our engineers position is relayed back to our office over Co-pilot via the GPRS connection, at this point all jobs booked for that engineer are sent automatically to their PDA. All processed jobs are sent back to our server at the same time. We also have a facility to send screen messages to the drivers using Co-pilots system. All our contract No.s are held in co-pilots database on the PDA in the POI. Section as well as SPEED CAMERAS therefore navigation is easily achieved between contracts once a job arrives. Out of hours jobs not sent from the office are entered by the engineer on to the PDA with just the contract reference No. and the details are automatically added when the job gets back to the office.

Jobs can be rejected, re-scheduled with ease customers signatures are not printed on site but mailed (usually with the invoice) after processing at the office. We never get stuck without a spec on site, and loosing paper is a thing of the past.

The system may change to a server & fixed IP systems per PDA controlled by PC Data (I think they should go this route).

Be warned we have been testing this product for over a year. Its good but not perfectly refined, its not e-mail based. We looked at Mentor and decided it was a business package with modifications and falls short of what is required by our industry, oh and expensive. PC Data charge £850 for the initial user and £250 for each additional user dependant on having their initial database. The recoup time is probably less than 6-months. Or you can write your own.

jef