We have a service management program/database in the office and we print out service jobs and fax them to our engineers. We now want to give them a PDA so they can view and update jobs while out and about. Jobs details must be stored locally on the PDA as they often work in areas where they have to switch mobile devices to ‘flight mode’ (e.g. hospitals). We then want the PDA to synchronise it’s database with the server in the office.

Can anyone recommend some developer software/programming tools to enable me to do this as easily as possible?

Thanks

I’ve used visual studio and .net for windows PDA and it is piss easy, although probably at the price of resource efficiency

If the PDA is running Windows Mobile you could install SQL Compact 3.5 on the device (essentially a small footprint SQL Server for use on a mobile device). This can be setup to sync to your main DB whenever a signal is available (i.e. when device not in flight mode). You would also need a Windows application to run on the device on top of this database for record input, viewing etc. Obviously how ‘piss easy’ it is depends on what you want the windows mobile application, what you want to do to resolve any inconsistencies between the mobile database and your main database on syncing etc etc

degree of piss easiness is of course subjective and dependant on who is asking for the estimates and paying 🙂

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Visual Studio + the Windows Mobile development SDK should do the job. I’ve done something vaguely similar to this but using bluetooth to update once in range of the source PC. There’s an excellent 3rd party Bluetooth SDK (Microsoft’s is simply appalling) which makes it a lot easier.

Also worth considering is the Pocket Programming Language, but I’m not sure whether it can do what you need. However, it’s extremely powerful and possibly a quicker and easier solution than beating out a full project in VS.

I think you may find the whole process easier by using FileMaker Pro and iPhones.