hi all,
im researching some methods to distribute jobs to a small army of people across Canada and was wondering if anyone had some tips to help me along.
My main question is, how (and what software / hardware) would i need to equip every person with a PDA and be able to send out messages (via Email i suppose) to the PDA's with scheduled jobs the people have to go on.
A couple of things though:
1. I want the message to be delivered to the PDA without the user having to check email, press some sort of Send / Receive. Almost like a Pager. AS long as its on and they have some sort of wireless connection it should send the message and beep or vibrate or something.
2. I dont know what services offer this stuff so any listing of companies that do this / or service plans that include this, would be helpful. Obviouslly WIFI networks will not work because they will need to be near an access point and this surely will not be available in Northern parts of Canada. So would i have to subscribe to some sort of CDMA network of something like that
3. What PDA would you recommend I have an Ipaq and honestly i dont really like it, i cant get MS Broadcast messaging to work on it, and im unaware of any services that equip IPaqs with CDMA or cell service. I've never used a Blackberry, but to me it seems they have capabilities to do this.
Any guidance on this appreciated.
Regards,
mcm
Sending out messages from a .net app to Pda's - advice
H.Saber
CDMA/1X (Sprint, Verizon) or GSM/GPRS (Cingular, TMobile) will work fine with an internet accessible web service as long as the amount of data you're transmitting isn't huge. The speeds on these networks will be similar to a 56k modem. If you can, I'd take a look at EDGE capable devices or Verizon's wireless broadband service which uses CDMA if it can't find a G3 network. The speeds are incredible, about 800kbps.
Have Fun,
-B
Bjoern
Hey there,
Sounds to me like you should investigate writing a mobile smart client application using the Compact Framework. You can write mobile client apps for PocketPC and Smartphone right out of the VS2005 box. The compact framework supports web services as well as 80% of the XML and ADO.NET functionality that the full .NET framework provides. So basically you can write a mobile smart client that can recognize connectivity and call your web service all without the user interaction like you want. The added bonus is that since it's a smart client user interface and not web-based WML, you can cache the data on the phone/device if they don't have connectivity providing an occasionally connected scenario.
Take a look here for more info: http://msdn.microsoft.com/mobility/windowsmobile/howto/getstarted/default.aspx
HTH,
-Beth
astrogene1000
thanks a lot Beth, thats great.
the whole system will be web based (client requests to main office) and it'll all be .net so this is a great idea, thanks again. One more question though, what kind of network will i have to be on, some of these drivers will be in areas where WAP's will be few and far between, however CDMA (or GSM) coverage will cover them, can i get some sort of service that allows me to connect via CDMA to a server on the net to download my info
thanks
mcm