.KEYWORD ebooks
.FLYINGHEAD MOBILE DOCUMENTS
.TITLE How to use ebooks in your enterprise
.FEATURE
.SPOTLIGHT FIGALT cover.gif
.SUMMARY Ebooks have long been popular for entertainment purposes, but they’re capable of so much more. Ray Rischpater will show you how you can harness the power of ebooks in the enterprise and walk you through the simple steps needed to create your own proprietary ebooks for your business needs.
.AUTHOR Ray Rischpater
Everybody knows that ebooks are great for entertainment. Few, however, recognize their value in the enterprise as well. With today’s heavy reliance on the Web and laptops, the small, easily carried reference book that a generation ago was the constant companion of many professionals has all but disappeared. These days, you’re more likely to find your staff booting up their laptops to find a critical piece of information in a document or email, or carrying rumpled printouts wherever they go.

It doesn’t have to be like that. You can quickly augment your enterprise with ebooks, often at little or no expense other than preparing the manuscript itself. In fact, as you’ll see in a moment, if the document’s available, you may already have all you need at your disposal!

.H1 Why ebooks in the enterprise?
In the enterprise, your staff refers to countless bits of information throughout the day. From engineering reference material to corporate policy, much of this information is already in electronic form on Web pages and in email throughout your company. Even more often, specific information may be required by staff on the go for a particular group, such as product features for your sales organization.

The ebook provides an easy-to-use repository for this kind of information for both fixed and mobile workers. Ebooks are easy for you to create, immanently portable, and quickly searched. With today’s Palm OS organizers, an employee can carry hundreds of kilobytes of text and images in ebooks for reference whenever needed.

Ebooks are ideal for reference information that seldom changes. While much of this information in the enterprise is already available over the Web, not all handhelds are equipped by their users with anywhere Web access, and it’s inconvenient to access the Web for static information. Instead, you can place this information in an ebook on a handheld, where it’s readily searched and read when needed.

.H1 Harnessing the Web
Almost all organizations today have an intranet, a private network of Web pages that contain company information such as vacation policy, travel policy, product pricing, or what have you. Many intranets include department-specific procedures, like sales, system administration, or engineering process documentation that you need to read frequently as part of your job.

These documents are in HTML (HyperText Markup Language). For years, Palm OS handheld users have enjoyed HTML documents on their handhelds thanks to Web browsers such as AvantGo (at http://www.avantgo.com) and the Palm Mobile Internet Kit (MIK).

Although designers of these products envision you’ll use their software to fetch dynamic documents from a remote Web server, there’s no reason why you can’t use a Web browser like AvantGo and the Palm Mobile Internet Kit to view local content as well.

If your organization has purchased a license for the AvantGo Enterprise Server, you should seriously consider making your static intranet content an AvantGo channel. Doing so lets your mobile staff synchronize the content to their handhelds, so they can refer to it at any time. In general, any HTML that doesn’t use forms and makes sparing use of tables works well with AvantGo; fortunately, that describes most intranet content as well. While you can use the consumer version of AvantGo for this purpose in some situations, I don’t recommend it. Not only do you run the risk of violating AvantGo’s usage agreement, you may also inadvertently expose private corporate information to outsiders. For specific information, you should consult the developer documentation that’s available with your copy of the AvantGo Enterprise Server.

Without the AvantGo Enterprise Server, you still have another option: the Palm MIK. The Palm MIK is designed to let you create and view PQAs (Palm Query Applications), also known as Web clipping applications, on the handheld. The PQAs are used to fetch remote content, and the MIK can also browse static content entirely on the handheld. In other words, you can create an ebook simply by packaging up an HTML document as a PQA. Let’s see how.

.H1 Palm Mobile Internet Kit
The Palm Mobile Internet Kit is available with Palm OS 4.0 and as an upgrade for previous Palm OS handhelds on CD-ROM. Installing it is easy; simply run the installer and synchronize your handheld.

Making a PQA is only slightly harder. You’ll need a copy of the Palm Web clipping application SDK, available at http://www.palmos.com. The SDK includes both developer documentation and the PQA Builder, an application that packages up Web documents into a Palm database that you install on your Palm handheld. The PQA Builder runs on both Windows and Macintosh, although there’s not yet a Mac OS X native version of the application.

You write your PQA using standard HTML, such as the following ebook I wrote for our local Amateur Radio Emergency Service team last summer:

.BEGIN_CODE

NOAA Weather Radio Frequencies

NOAA VHF Weather Frequencies

• 162.400


• 162.425


• 162.450


• 162.475


• 162.500


• 162.525


• 162.550

Provided by Ray Rischpater, KF6GPE from the NOAA Weather Radio Web page.

These days, you don’t need to know HTML to create it. You can simply use a word processor and save the results as HTML. When you do this, you need to keep the following in mind:

.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET At the head of your document, include the line <META NAME="PalmComputingPlatform" CONTENT="true"> in the HTML source between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags. This line tells the Palm MIK viewer that the HTML is suitable for the Palm handheld.
.END_LIST

.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET Keep your text layout relatively simple. Use a minimum of fonts and styles to get your point across. This is good advice anytime you’re writing, by the way.
.END_LIST

.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET You can link multiple documents and include images by using the file:\// URL. Most HTML editors will let you add links to other documents by selecting the text to link and entering the URL, while adding an image is often as easy as pasting it into your document.
.END_LIST

.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET Use images sparingly. Images consume a great deal of memory on the device.
.END_LIST

To make the ebook, you use the Palm Query Application Builder (shown in Figure A), which collects your HTML and image content and converts it into a special Palm database that the Mobile Internet Kit shows as formatted text.

.FIGPAIR A Here is the Palm Query Application Builder.

You begin by selecting "Load HTML