What we did
We set up an intranet "Coola Sync Site" to allow staff members to synchronize common- or area-specific meeting dates, Address Book entries, emergency call lists, staff listings for each area, standard operating procedures (.PDB documents), quick notes (Memo Pad entries), and other safety related information. An example of a central Coola Sync Site can be seen in Figure A.

FIGURE A


Here's an example of a central Coola Sync Site. Roll over picture for a larger image.

An example of an area-specific synchronization point is pictured in Figure B.

FIGURE B


Here's an example of an area-specific synchronization point. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The code for extracting information from our database and making it available in several formats (in this case Address Book and Memo Pad entries) is listed below. However, first you have to install Coola's software.

Coola PC software installation
The first step is to configure the client PCs. Figure that it will take approximately five minutes per PC.

First, download and install the Coola.exe file to the client PC from http://www.coola.com. Double-click on the file to begin the installation. You can copy the coola.exe file to your network drive to allow for faster installations.

Next, download and install Coola. Right Click to enable Web page coolet creation by the user. This allows an individual user to create a coolet to capture information directly from a Web page by selecting text and right-clicking.

Finally, sign up for a Coola account for the user.

Coola handheld software installation
Installation of the Coola.prc file on Palm handhelds should take less than a minute (or whatever your standard synchronization time is). The software allows you to reset your login, as shown in Figure C, and allows you to retrieve coolets on any Coola configured computer, not just your own.

FIGURE C

The Coola application allows you to reset your login.

It's important to note that if coolets are retrieved on a "foreign" machine, other complications need to be considered. The HotSync manager needs to be configured to "do nothing" for other applications which may conflict.

Creating the code
The next step is to implement a routine that will dynamically create an HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) page containing the hidden fields used to populate the Palmhandheld. In the example to follow, an Oracle PL/SQL (Procedural Language/Structured Query Language) procedure (written using Oracle's Web Toolkit packages) is used to populate and dynamically create the HTML page. Completion times for this step vary, but the Address Book portion took us approximately one hour. This included coding and debugging.

Here's the PL/SQL code:

Cursor AU_CUR is used to generate the hidden fields for an HTML form that will contain a coolet for synchronizing the Address Book. This coolet will be used to update the Address Book information for various active authorized researchers in a given geographical area, specified by the hpcode parameter.