Going mobile with new Web Technologies
Enabling the capturing and viewing of data whilst on the move is a bit of a ‘no-brainer’ given the spread out and mobile nature of our workforce. It improves efficiency, safety and overall responsiveness to our customers. On any given day we have hundreds of field staff working on our project and maintenance activities. Historically they have had some connectivity back to our systems using what would now be considered a reasonably legacy VPN (virtual private network) solution but its put a lot of people off because it’s been slow and very device dependent. Secure, device agnostic web-based delivery has long been held as the panacea in this area. The challenges has been getting browser-based apps to be a usable as their desktop cousins.
Richer web technologies such as Adobe Flash, and more recently Microsoft Silverlight, have gone some way to bridge the gap between 'rich’ desktop applications and traditionally 'lite’ browser-based ones. The main challenge with these technologies has been that they were reliant on browser plugins & played well in some instances and poorly in others.
For example, we use a GIS (geographic information system) platform that relies on Adobe Flex which makes it difficult to deliver it to our ever increasing number of iPad users.
With a resurgence in the drive for mobility we have recently started looking at what technologies are out there which would help us best meet our objective of secure, anywhere and to any device. We quickly shifted our focus to HTML5 which seemed to tick more boxes than any of the other offerings we considered.
Working with a couple of partners, we started building field data collection applications for deployment on Apple, Android, Windows Mobile and Blackberry devices. We have invested in a framework which allowed us to deliver cross-platform functionality with 'near native’ integration (for example, data and time selectors on iPads) without having to recode for specific devices or form factors. In essence we have built a solution which allows us to convert our paper-based forms into electronic versions and have the data submitted from those forms in real-time back to a series of data stores. We are also able to use some of the advanced capabilities of the devices including capturing information using the camera and GPS functions.
We have also coupled this solution with one based on Adobe’s PDF forms technology to offer us a rapid development & deployment option. We utilise PDF forms to capture data and post it - via the web - to our databases or email it through to the right people. This makes it easy to seamlessly distribute information amongst both internal staff and external parties & stakeholders.
We have tried several user scenarios & pilot field deployments and have had excellent user participation and uptake. In the new year we will be looking to mobile enable more and more of our condition assessment maintenance activities.