Office Power in the GIS on a Laptop

Field Deployment Timeline
2 nd quarter 98- purchased and started to deploy laptops
2 nd quarter 98- developed the data transfer strategy
3 rd quarter 98- began a pilot with the updated design application
1 st quarter 99- deployed all laptops in the field

Hardware
We decided to purchase off-the-shelf laptop computers rather than ruggedized for the following reasons:

Cost
RAM capacity
Hard drive capacity
Experience

The characteristics of the laptops are 233 MHZ Pentium II, 128MB RAM, 6.5GB hard drive and a 13.1” active matrix color screen. We currently have 19 laptops in the field. The laptops have served us relatively well thus far, with a few minor problems:

We could not use a docking station due to the dongles required for licenses: this caused broken network cords from constant plugging and unplugging.
Glare on the screen made it hard to see in bright sunlight.
Closing the lid of the laptop at times (when disconnecting from the network and going out to the truck) shut the system down, requiring a reboot. Installing Softex software solved this problem.
The lids developed problems from constant opening and closing.

Training
The design application training was completed the 1 st quarter of 1999. Instruction was also provided on the upload and download data transfer procedure. In addition we provided training on the hardware and third party software.

Implementation Issues
We had to reconfigure our design application for use on the laptop; data model changes were required. Maintenance of our replica databases is resource intensive but is getting better. Support from senior management is still required. The planners are accepting GIS as a tool for them and BHE. An estimating application has been developed and deployed allowing the planners to do an estimate with the push of a button.