A report from the field
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The early word from Sun's field engineers is that the Linux-based handheld devices it has started rolling out are pretty handy.
"I'm pleased with it," says Freddy Mock, a Sun field engineer in Denver, and one of the first beta users of Sun's Field Service Appliance. Some of the beta users, ex-IBMers, are calling it the Brick, after an old IBM portable device.
"I like the flow of it. We get all the information for [the job assignment], and we can update the call as we progress," Mock says. "And the supervisor has up-to-the-minute information on the call right on his desktop computer."
He carries it in a belt pouch and keys in his user ID and password to use the applications. The 19.2K bit/sec speed of the CDPD cellular net is much slower than a 10M bit/sec LAN, but adequate, according to Mock. The on-screen graphical user interface uses a flock of abbreviations and "you have to remember them," he says.
Mock says he can now quickly add notes on a repair job via the handheld's on-screen or plug-in keyboards, and this information is uploaded to the field engineering databases when he reconnects to the network.
"If the customer site crashes again, then the engineers online can see, 'Well, Freddy did this thing, we can therefore check this other thing,'" he says. "In the past, I'd carry that data around for maybe two days. They'd have to call me or page me, and ask me what I'd done."
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