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How to use ebooks in your enterprise (continued)
Although designers of these products envision you'll use their software to fetch dynamic documents from a remote Web server, there's no reason why you can't use a Web browser like AvantGo and the Palm Mobile Internet Kit to view local content as well.
If your organization has purchased a license for the AvantGo Enterprise Server, you should seriously consider making your static intranet content an AvantGo channel. Doing so lets your mobile staff synchronize the content to their handhelds, so they can refer to it at any time. In general, any HTML that doesn't use forms and makes sparing use of tables works well with AvantGo; fortunately, that describes most intranet content as well. While you can use the consumer version of AvantGo for this purpose in some situations, I don't recommend it. Not only do you run the risk of violating AvantGo's usage agreement, you may also inadvertently expose private corporate information to outsiders. For specific information, you should consult the developer documentation that's available with your copy of the AvantGo Enterprise Server.
Without the AvantGo Enterprise Server, you still have another option: the Palm MIK. The Palm MIK is designed to let you create and view PQAs (Palm Query Applications), also known as Web clipping applications, on the handheld. The PQAs are used to fetch remote content, and the MIK can also browse static content entirely on the handheld. In other words, you can create an ebook simply by packaging up an HTML document as a PQA. Let's see how.
Palm Mobile Internet Kit
The Palm Mobile Internet Kit is available with Palm OS 4.0 and as an upgrade for previous Palm OS handhelds on CD-ROM. Installing it is easy; simply run the installer and synchronize your handheld.
Making a PQA is only slightly harder. You'll need a copy of the Palm Web clipping application SDK, available at http://www.palmos.com. The SDK includes both developer documentation and the PQA Builder, an application that packages up Web documents into a Palm database that you install on your Palm handheld. The PQA Builder runs on both Windows and Macintosh, although there's not yet a Mac OS X native version of the application.
You write your PQA using standard HTML, such as the following ebook I wrote for our local Amateur Radio Emergency Service team last summer:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>NOAA Weather Radio Frequencies</TITLE>
<META NAME="PalmComputingPlatform" CONTENT="true">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>NOAA Weather Radio Frequencies</H1>
<P>NOAA VHF Weather Frequencies</P>
<UL>
<LI>162.400</LI>
<LI>162.425</LI>
<LI>162.450</LI>
<LI>162.475</LI>
<LI>162.500</LI>
<LI>162.525</LI>
<LI>162.550</LI>
</UL>
<P>Provided by Ray Rischpater, KF6GPE from the NOAA Weather Radio Web page.</P>
<P></P>
</BODY>
</HTML>
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