Little Logos

New Project. Love new.
Inventory control of human specimens in the morgue on campus.
RFID was the initial thought but ended up with more conventional Barcode scanners.
Great chance to do some work in .Net and SQL with GPRS (mobile) PocketPC devices although the web front end may still end up in domino given our in-house experience and the security model.

The decision to use PocketPCs with mobile telephony was actually pretty straightforward on cost and implementation grounds.

More to follow.

This was an interesting contract to build a data collection tool on an older PocketPC. Given that the client was probably going to:

• need further surveys
• use multiple devices 
• have a limited budget

I opted to buy a tool and build the survey using the tool rather than custom write the survey from scratch.

The tool I ended up with was from Pendragon Software and is called Forms.

The tool works on Palm and PocketPc and has adequate layouting and scripting functionality. It is a little slow with calculations but is excellent at managing survey deployment, versioning and managing data collected with different devices. On the pc end it uses a database backend that is starting to show its age.

Overall for the price it was a very good tool for the project and we were able to build and prototype the survey very quickly as a result. Because I didnt have to build any of the backend I was able to spend more time on building the survey logic and training the users and we still stayed on budget.