Building a Mobile Pocket PC Application with Lotus Notes and Cadenza mForms
With more than ninety million seats worldwide, Lotus Notes is an established groupware standard for many large corporates, and has long been used to allow remote PC and laptop users to synchronize databases with head office servers. So can it be deployed onto Pocket PCs to create genuinely mobile applications? In this article, based on the development of a real-life mobile enterprise, I explain a straightforward approach to building powerful Notes applications for the Pocket PC.
Mobile marketing application
Our client for this project was Red Bull UK, the British arm of the worldwide energy drinks company. As part of its marketing campaign Red Bull employs teams of field-based staff to promote their product at events around the UK. In the spring of 2002 they made the decision to significantly expand this workforce, making the existing manual and paper-based processes inadequate for the expected level of information flow between head office and the field.
We were given the brief to develop a mobile application that would link the marketing staff in the field with head office departments in London. The key functions of the new system were to be as follows:
Requirements
Some 100 field-based staff, in 30 teams, to enter details of each promotional visit and event that they attend, into a Pocket PC
The ability to incorporate photographs into the data
Features to enable staff to complete and submit timesheets and expense claims on the Pocket PC
A Frequently Asked Questions facility for products, with full-text search
Wireless communication from the field
The ability to create and send messages from head office to the field
Direct wireless communication between the Pocket PCs and the client’s Lotus Notes databases, with onward interfaces to sales and payroll systems
In addition to the stated requirements there were some further constraints that would have a bearing on the choices to be made:
First, the proposed users are entirely mobile—they rarely return to the office. Based on our previous experience, we felt it was extremely likely that the client would want modifications to the system after its implementation. Recalling all the users “back to base” to update the application on a regular basis would be impractical. It was therefore important that the technology we chose allowed for users to receive updates to the application remotely, as well as being able to synchronize data.
Second, the communication platform that would ultimately enable users to transmit their data would need to be readily available, fast, and cost effective to use.
Technology choices
Mobile Hardware
We chose the iPAQ 3870, augmented with Nexian Corporation’s Nexicam digital camera attachment. We felt the iPAQ was tried and tested, and the inclusion of Bluetooth put it ahead of other contenders. The choice of digital camera attachment also steered us towards the iPAQ. We evaluated several models, some with CompactFlash interfaces, which would have opened up our choices of Pocket PC, but the Nexicam, with its “iPAQ-only” interface, delivered the best results and sealed our decision.
Application Software
It was a client requirement that the server end of the application should integrate with Lotus Domino. Although we could have adopted alternative technologies for the Pocket PC end of the system, to maintain simplicity our preference was to develop the entire system using Lotus Notes.
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