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PROGRAMMING POWER
Using coolets in an enterprise environment
By Shawn Googins and Charles Boxill
Have you heard of coolets? Coolets, from Coola, Inc. (at http://www.coola.com) are snippets of information that can be effortlessly synchronized to your Palm handheld through a click of the mouse on your Internet connected computer. Coolets can be an event (Date Book entry), Address Book or Memo Pad entry, a signature (your electronic business card), or a document in .PDB format. Coolets can be created by an individual user or generated "en mass" by a webmaster or developer. These coolets are then processed by the Coola server and synchronized to the client's handheld on a coolet enabled computer.
Prior to performing a HotSync, the individual user has the ability to control which coolets will actually be sent to the Palm handheld by reviewing or editing the "un-synchronized" coolets section of their own Coola account. You can learn more about how coolets work in the article, "A Coola way to get information," by Dan Wolfson in the October 2000 issue of PalmPower at http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue200010/coola001.html.
After discovering Coola and sending a barrage of signature, event, and memo coolets to defenseless friends and co-workers (overwhelmed at the shear volume of single coolets), I got to thinking. There had to be a way to send multiple coolets encompassing many Date Book events, memos, or Palm documents and to distribute them to a workforce in an enterprise or small business environment.
What if you could interface the production of these coolets with an Oracle database? Imagine your sales force, field support, in-house staff, or better yet, your customers madly synchronizing data with their PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants). Important information that they need, and more importantly, that you want them to have. Staff meeting dates and agendas, project deadlines, client addresses, sports events, promotional materials, safety checklists, driving directions, updated service manuals, product release information, or novels can be synchronized to a Palm handheld using coolets. Towards that end, we've come up with "enterprise" coolets.
Some background
In our environment at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD we have a staff of health physicists (radiation safety specialists) who are Palm handheld-enabled (using Palm IIIx, Palm IIIxe, Palm V, and Symbol Technologies SPT-1500 devices). Areas of the facility are geographically distributed so that each individual is responsible for safety oversight of approximately 200 laboratories, 600 individuals, and the radioactive materials and radiation producing equipment used in biomedical research in these areas. We run an Oracle 8.0.1.5.0 database on a Microsoft NT network that contains comprehensive information regarding personnel radiation exposure, radioactive materials inventory, receipt and disposal of radioactive materials, laboratory analysis, and survey data. Essentially everything to enable regulatory compliance and a safe working environment is tracked in the database.
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