Mobile Phone as an Inspections Tool--Experiences with a Service for Field Force

In this paper we investigate the use of mobile phone as an inspection tool for field force workers. The paper presents the architecture and our experiences with the development and use of a pilot solution for Nokia as a point of sale (POS) review tool. The main focus is on dealing with the special issues faced in the mobile environment and on providing the solution as a service. XForms and the underlying messaging framework provided a good interface for the users and transparent connectivity with the server side. The main lessons learned was that mobile phone can be a good inspection tool but needs carefully planned user interface, the system has to have offline functionality in cases where is no network coverage and XForms provided a good solution for making quick changes into the forms when needed.