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Capital Project Management / Condition Assessment
Environmental & Risk Management / Environmental Sustainability

Using a Tablet PC for Field Assessments

Windows tablet PCs (running the Microsoft Windows XP Tablet Edition operating system) provide a large screen area to work with, which can be very helpful when working with large floor plans and large quantities of data.

Wireless Network

If your tablet PC is part of a wireless network, assessors using tablet PCs enter the data "live" to the ARCHIBUS database. Data synchronization is not required.

If your tablet PC is not part of a wireless network, you may wish to consider adding wireless networking capabilities to your ARCHIBUS server and Windows tablet PC. Most tablet PCs either include, or accept, wireless network cards, such as 802.11a/b/g or Bluetooth. If your IT infrastructure supports wireless networking, you can eliminate the need to synchronize data by using the Windows Tablet PC as a standard client machine. For more details regarding wireless networks and the issues involved, consult your IT department or your ARCHIBUS Business Partner.

Manually Synchronizing Data

If your tablet PC is not part of a wireless network, you can follow this general procedure to synchronize the data between the database server and your tablet PC.

  1. From the desktop, establish the assessment items that will be surveyed by running the Generate Records feature of the Manage Assessment Items task.
  2. Copy the database from the desktop to your tablet PC. Your tablet PC will now have assessment item records that can be completed.
  3. On the tablet PC, an assessor in the field enters the condition or environmental sustainability of equipment and rooms by editing the assessment item records.
  4. When assessors complete the assessment, you must update your server database with the updated assessment item records. Consult your database server software for information on synchronizing these databases.