This document is intended for a non-technical audience. It will provide information on producing Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) applications that will operate over the Internet.

The Current Landscape

In today's vibrant and fast-paced business world, staying ahead of the competition is ever more important and can sometimes make the difference between success and failure. A decade ago, portable computers became almost a necessity. The mobile workforce needed to be more effective outside of the office and away from their desks and hence the 'shrunk PC', or laptop, became de rigueur for professionals everywhere.

The laptop is still a very viable business tool, but do we really need all of that computing power? Examine the kind of things that a mobile workforce may need to do when away from the office:

• E-mail
• Produce documents
• Take notes
• Exchange e-cards
• Access company data
• Browse the web
• Manage centralized scheduling

There are undoubtedly other tasks, but the question is how many of these tasks require a laptop?

PDAs have come on leaps and bounds in the last few years. Some have color displays and 64Mb of memory. Almost all have wireless capability and most have the ability to manage all of the usual tasks normally undertaken on a laptop. Now the mobile workforce can be equipped with much smaller, lightweight PDAs that allow them to perform their vital work but in a much more convenient manner.

Asta SkyWire enables connecting your PDA to your company data, via the Internet. It describes a system consisting of a computer application designed to serve your data and business rules, and client libraries for Palm and WinCE based PDAs to handle that served data live.

Take a look how Asta SkyWire could be used for following links at the right side or see most popular Questions & Answers.

• Delivery Service
• Ambulance Service
• Mobile Police Officer
• Service Company
• Inventory Manager
• GPS Navigator
• Physicians Virtual Office
• Salesman's Closer
• Parking Enforcement
• Security