From Pilot to Roll out in 90 Days

Grande Prairie Alberta, city of swans and beautiful sunsets, is using Inspector+ to help maintain excellent service to the local building community while supporting one of Alberta's fastest growth rates, having surpassed the 40,000 mark in population in their 2003 census.

North Bay is a vibrant city of 53,000 people, nestled between Lake Nipissing and Trout Lake. This growing city is conveniently located just three and a half hours from centers such as Toronto and Ottawa; North Bay is just north enough to be perfect. The city is demonstrating its ongoing commitment to the quality of life of both citizens and visitors with an aggressive new program for logging trip hazards and other inconsistencies in the city’s sidewalk infrastructure. Pen System’s Sidewalker software allows North Bay’s public works and services division to complete sidewalk inspections and include geo-located data from the attached GPS receiver.

North Bay’s existing GIS systems will also benefit from the data being gathered in the field by simultaneously collecting street addresses and location data along while completing the sidewalk survey. Sidewalker is already in motion gathering important information regarding cracks, trip hazards, and other problems with sidewalks that plagues many towns and cities.

Pen Systems, along with our partners Bell Mobility and xwave, presented a series of case studies on wireless solutions for municipal building, fire and public works departments. We have received a number of requests for copies of the presentation along with further information on the individual case studies. MISA has made the presentation available at the following link: http://www.hamilton.ca/city-hall/Information-Technology-Services/MISA/presentations.asp

This month we are leaving the handhelds alone - they're all excellent right now, but there are a few new field printers you should have a look at:

We are delighted to announce support for two of the most exciting field printers we've seen in a long time: the HP 350c  and the HP450. 

Inspector+ on the Tablet, PPC and Palm environments support both these new Hewlett Packard offerings, which are receiving the highest reviews from the field. 

Both printers offer portability in the field, infrared and wireless printing remotely and are robust enough to survive the inspector's day-to-day routines. Tungstens and other BlueTooth units can print from hundreds of metres away while on a building site, or use the more private (in-cab) infrared.

The HP450 is larger than it's HP350 cousin, and offers multiple inspection-notices to be fed at a time into it's capacious paper feeder - and yet is still small enough to sit on the glove-box or cab of the truck and handle almost 100 print-jobs before the battery needs a top-up.

The HP350, on the other hand, is tiny and can be easily put into a pocket or carried into an inspection-environment.  This printer can handle single sheets only, but as our users mainly only print once copy for the contractors or owners, the HP350 is suitable for building, fire and our biological inspectors to leave on-site hardcopy.

Of course there are other printers we will recommend for your particular evironment, but it is always a delight to see reliable field-ready products for us to evaluate, and HP has certainly achieved truly high-quality field printing with these two units, capable of handling on all our standard forms with colour or black ink at excellent speeds.