Welcome to the first edition of the monthly Dataworks newsletter This newsletter will bring you each months articles about projects recently completed by Dataworks & company news. You will also find examples of how technology has been successfully applied to businesses, big & small, in Ireland and abroad to improve their business processes & productivity. At the bottom of this newsletter, you will find a monthly technology column, 'The Leading Edge', which will bring you the most up-to-date industry news. We hope you will enjoy the newsletter and will find it a useful monthly resource. Should you want to unsubscribe, simply click on the link provided at the end of the page and type "remove" as the subject.

In August, Marc Roosli, award-winning Swiss designer and marketer joined forces with Dataworks as a Business Development Manager & Designer. Marc is also a Director of the design house Rell Studios boasting clients such as ESB, HB Ice Cream, MTV and Red Bull. Rell Interactive, the web & multimedia division of Rell Studios is now an integral part of Dataworks. "I'm delighted with the newly created Rell Interactive/ Dataworks team which is one of the strongest teams of specialists in Ireland. We are now bringing together cutting-edge technology and award-winning design" says Marc. "Having our own in-house designer ensures that all software interfaces and websites produced are always easy to use & aesthetically pleasing " adds Brian Robinson of Dataworks.
Dataworks and Rell Studios have worked together on a number of international projects in the past and this fusion is therefore a natural progression for both companies.

New website for Dataworks Dataworks' new website has just been launched at www.dataworks.ie. The site has been redesigned to be more representative of the high quality services provided by the company. The services have been grouped into five areas which are: - custom software development - on-site software engineering - web development - software products - consultancy News & featured projects will be added on a regular basis to keep you informed of all of Dataworks' developments

Dataworks secure contract with Bausch & Lomb Scotland Dataworks, working with the Global Shop Floor Manager (David Sheppard - B&L), has recently been appointed by B&L Scotland to provide consultancy, system integration and development expertise in rolling out Bausch & Lomb's Global Shop Floor Information System. The system developed by a combined team of B&L and Dataworks software engineers has now been adopted as the Global SFIS of choice within B&L. "This is a major step in the developement of our partnership with B&L" says Liam Curham of Dataworks; "and B&L's IT Project Manager is delighted with the work completed to date". "From a project management point of view it is vital to have access to high-calibre software engineering resource. Dataworks has consistently provided such resource, delivering high quality work within schedule and I simply could not ask for anything more." Neil McFarlane, IT Project Manager in B&L Scotland

New version of TillComm released Dataworks has released the new and improved version of TillComm, the software that links a till to a PC through a simple serial cable. TillComm was born 3 years ago in partnership with a local supplier of tills to fill the gap between simple cash registers and the big 'super-market style' computerised systems. The majority of retailers would already use computers for most of their administration tasks so why not use those to automate the painstaking process of programming a till and use information stored in the latter efficiently, to improve the running of a retail operation? For more info about TillComm, check out the TillComm website at www.tillcomm.com or click here for the full article.

European project for Dataworks ASSET (Asylum Support Systems in European Territories) is a two-year project (2003-2004) supported by the European Commission Directorate General for Education and Culture under its Joint Actions Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci and Youth initiative. Dataworks has developed a multilingual website to support this innovative project with features such as a forum, a password protected extranet allowing people working on the project to share documents, a utility section with translator and verb conjugator and much more. The site, which can be found at www.asseteu.com, is completely updateable by users at different levels using the made-to-measure content management system developed by Dataworks and Rell Studios for Waterford LEADER Partnership who are the people behind the ASSET project.

The Occasionally Connected Computing (OCC) Model
This month in 'The Leading Edge' is an introduction to the Occasionally Connected Computing (OCC) model. You may have already encountered the Mobility Inflection Point—if not, you soon will. It’s a dramatic change in mainstream technologies and user expectations based on these three trends:

• Motivated by productivity improvement, business users are making notebook PCs their client systems of choice and they are also beginning to embrace powerful PDAs and intelligent Web phones
• For similar reasons, businesses are piloting and deploying wireless LANs
• No longer tied to their desks, more and more business people expect to be productive while they are on the go, even if that’s simply going from an office to a conference room

Mobile/wireless PCs are creating new expectations among business users. They want to maintain their work sessions without disruption as they move in and out of subnets and in and out of wireless hot spots. But service discontinuities mean mobile/wireless PC users have to operate in an intermittently connected world. Unfortunately, many of today’s applications fail to deliver seamless productivity in such an environment: that’s the challenge and the opportunity presented by the Mobility Inflection Point.

Applications today are largely divided across a chasm of local desktop applications with little reliance on the network for data, and web applications that are totally dependent on a live network connection. In reality, people are not living in these connectivity extremes, and typically have occasional access to the network, particularly with mobile computers and handheld devices. The existing model for applications today doesn't represent this usage pattern well, where applications largely fall into "desktop" or "web" categories. Applications should be able to more easily live across both of these worlds, gaining the advantages of network connectivity when it's available and continuing to function on the local desktop when off-line.

This is the challenge that companies such as Intel and Macromedia have decided to address by providing hardware and software tools enabling us to produce such software. On the communications front, similar efforts have been made to improve coverage using Wi-Fi technology across the globe. One particular company in the UK has recently launched the first of 18 helium-filled balloons flying a mile up in the air and connected to the ground by fibre-optic cable. Anyone within a certain radius of these balloons will be able to get internet access using the appropriate hardware which means you could keep your laptop connected while traveling.

More on OCC and Macromedia Central at:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/central/whitepaper/central_wp.pdf
http://www.intel.com/products/mobiletechnology/hotspots/index.htm?iid=Homepage+ads_unwire_hotspots&

In next month's issue of 'The Leading Edge": the .NET compact framework