Mobile forms Jumpstart
Connecting state and local government leaders
Want to lighten the load of your mobile staff?
Want to lighten the load of your mobile staff? What if they could take your agency's forms with them on their cell phones, BlackBerrys or personal digital assistants? That would relieve them of the need to carry notebook PCs or clipboards with paper forms. And what if the data collected on those forms could be beamed directly back to the home office? Slick, eh?
Well, that's just what Jumpstart Wireless Corp. of Delray Beach, Fla., delivers with Jumpstart BusinessSuite. It's an application that allows enterprise IT organizations to cost-effectively deploy suites of wireless applications integrated with their existing IT infrastructure. The product takes any paper form and quickly transforms it into a wireless application.
The product has, in fact, been shipping since 2003. But many government users will now be encountering it since the JumpStart technology just started shipping with government services products from Maximus Inc.
Jeffrey Bonar, CEO of JumpStart, said there are more benefits than just lightening the load of mobile staff. First, since the data collected on forms is transmitted in real time, there are no delays in getting potentially critical information back to the home office. Second, since the data doesn't have to be re-entered off a paper form into a database, there's less opportunity for error.
While many agencies and departments may be leery of relying on wireless transmissions, Bonar said that JumpStart goes the extra mile to ensure security. For starters, transmissions are encrypted using the Secure Sockets Layer protocol. What's more, JumpStart technologies can take advantage of any other security the device itself supports.
Also, once the client software is installed on a mobile device, everything can be controlled through the server in your home office. 'You know exactly what applications are installed on the device,' said Bonar. 'The administrator gets to determine this on a user-by-user basis.' Bonar added that the JumpStart architecture is designed so that its applications run inside their own sandbox, which means users can run applications that may endanger the data.
Implementing JumpStart Wireless can cost anywhere from $15,000 to $50,000 for initial setup'depending on how much customization is required to integrate with back-end databases and applications'plus $35 per month per user. Volume discounts are available.
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