On a site initiation visit recently, a member of the Harte Group team accompanied an experienced, seasoned Contract Research Associate (CRA) to an academic site.  The physician was extremely busy and had previously arranged a 30 minute block of time to receive instruction, answer questions, etc.  I had inquired about the use of a checklist, something to help ensure that all tasks would be performed during the visit.  The experienced CRA mentioned that this task had been performed so many times before that it could be done in her sleep.  Upon sitting down in the conference room, the usual white out, post-its in multiple colors, and other support materials were all displayed on the table, along with many paper forms/copies for our meeting.  An extra piece of luggage had been brought along, as it contained the study binders and other materials for the staff.  For 2 hours, the meeting flowed extremely well, with papers and guidance documents being distributed, binders being presented.  During the brief time with the physician, instruction and protocol discussions ensued, with the physician demonstrating that he had read the protocol thoroughly, the indication and study drug was of great interest and showed a few folders of patient candidates already contacted – really terrific.  He was busy, had to leave, is there anything else?  The response for the CRA was no, was courteous in thanking him and off he went to fulfill multiple other duties.

During the final piece of the initiation with the coordinator, the CRA noticed that she failed to receive the investigator signatures and absolutely needed to see him.  The coordinator tried to locate him, but he could have been anywhere – for 2-1/2 hours, we attempted to track him down – finally catching him at an adjacent building between patient visits to receive the signatures.

So, what is the impact of a failure to use a guidance document or electronic forms?

The impact was that the CRA missed her flight, being charged for changing planes and now having a 5 hour delay at the airport.  When weather caused additional delays, she opted to fly to a different airport and drive to her home for an important family event – understandable.  She arrived safely.

How did this effect the Harte Group and our sponsor?  The CRA was an hourly-rate person, so the meter was running during this time – an additional 8-1/2 hours of time.  There was a change fee involved as a pass-through item and a car rental to drive home.  The ultimate insult was that the trip report for the visit was over 3 weeks late in being submitted.  The question: what was the CRA doing for the near 6 hours of airport time and why could the report not be completed sooner?

If the forms had been electronic, and a checklist aligned to assist the visit conduct, we would have saved a tremendous amount of time and money.  The coordinator also asked about receiving the materials electronically as they are capable of storing them in a file to be referenced during the trial.

For us, a lesson learned to utilize electronic forms – checklist, initiation visit materials, signature forms, and trip report documents would have enabled a smoother visit.

After demonstrating the new features and capabilities to its partners and customers on March 8^th, Mi-Co was pleased to announce the general availability of Mi-Forms v8.6. This is the 11^th major release of Mi-Co’s Mi-Forms platform dating back to 2001. This version of the system continues to push bounds of mobile data capture across multiple platforms.

Mobile web forms received the biggest update in v8.6. First introduced in Mi-Forms v8.5 in mid-2011, mobile web forms allow users to take forms designed in Mi-Forms Designer and fill them on any platform featuring a standards compliant web browser. Working with customers and partners who have successfully deployed Mi-Co’s mobile web forms over the last year, attention was given to two major areas, disconnected form filling, and overall user experience navigating available forms.

In order to provide offline capable web forms, Mi-Forms makes use of several web standards such as HTML 5 local storage and application manifest caching and CSS 3 display layout. This allows the Mi-Forms ASP.Net Server to provide form content in HTML and JavaScript, have that content stored locally on devices such as the iPad and Android tablets and then display the forms for data entry in a disconnected environment. Data that is recorded in this offline state is stored within the browser and is later synchronized with the server when a connection becomes available. Users may fill multiple forms and may revisit forms multiple times to ensure completeness of capture.

The new user interface displayed to form fillers is designed to be less technically oriented and provide a better organizational layout. The screenshots below show the v8.5 and v8.6 interface side by side (click to enlarge):

v8.5	v8.6

As you can see, filled forms are now grouped together with their corresponding blank form on the same page without the need to swap between “Form Templates and “Saved Form Sessions”. Additionally collapsible section headings allow a form filler to permanently hide forms they do not need. This combined with an at-a-glance storage usage indicator and large touch friendly buttons to set options help prevent the form filler from wasting valuable time navigating their home screen.

Additionally, Mi-Co has updated the Mi-Forms Client on the Windows platform in order to increase speed and efficiency especially when dealing with large forms containing multiple sub-forms. These changes as well other improvements to the Designer and Server round out the v8.6 release which is available for download to partners and customers.

In Honduras, I am finding data transmission speeds to be better from the Central America 1 highway over 3G than the landline is giving us. It takes 5 or 10 minutes to upload a 2 MB picture over the landline, and I just uploaded a picture via 3G in less than a minute. That said, data collection can surely be done via 3G using web forms on an iPad. Without 3G, the digital pen maybe the best alternative to address connectivity challenges.

We are here building a concrete block house for a family that previously had only a stick and mud house. They have 4 daughters and one son. The mother of the family is standing to the immediate right of the door of her soon to be completed new home.



The stylus is back for smartphones, thanks for the new Samsung Galaxy Note – a combination of a phone and tablet in one.

Since the first iPhone came out, every mobile device manufacturer shifted their development and efforts to having their own line of full-touch screen smartphones, and PDAs.

This surely breaks the overwhelming trend of touch input, which is basically what all the hardware manufacturers are keeping busy with these days.  Touch is everywhere – from smartphones, tablets, slates, and even on CNN segments where newscasters use 60 inch screens to show charts and weather maps (I first noticed it in the 2008 Presidential election coverage).   What used to be fiction is now a reality, as the transparent touchscreens in The Minority Report (2002) is now available in the market and can even be the kitchen window for those who can afford it.

I think it is a smart move that Samsung brought back the stylus – which is what Palm made popular more than a decade or so ago.  Of course the difference now is there’s so much more that you can do on these devices as a result of the literally thousands of apps that are developed each week.  The quality of interface, user experience, navigability and flexibility are clearly of a different generation.   For the enterprise, it gives yet another compact option of data collection via e-forms on your smartphone

I can imagine a lot of use for enterprise using this new Samsung Galaxy Note, especially for simple enough forms, where you can put in text and number fields, add in some check boxes or buttons, a picklist or two and a signature field.  At least now signatures will in fact look like the signatures, because lately, we’ve been playing around with the idea of using our fingertips for signing electronic forms; not exactly quality material if you ask me, as you don’t get that much accuracy on ink strokes with your fingertips.  With a stylus, you can sign, sketch, make annotations on images with good detail and precision.

Will others follow suit, or did Samsung make a good call on bringing back the stylus?  Personally, I think it is the right move as it gives us, the end users more options – addressing what “just touch” can’t do.

Mi-Forms, Mi-Co’s electronic forms software, can seamlessly integrate with the Laserfiche Electronic Content Management System.  After collecting data from the field using the Mi-Forms eForms (i.e.Tablet PC Forms, iPads electronic forms, or Android e-Forms), data exports such as PDF, CSV, XML can automatically be saved in the Laserfiche ECM System. Once in the Laserfiche ECM System, you can search reports or documents generated by Mi-Forms through specific search tags. To add, you can also open your Mi-Forms e-forms (i.e. electronic consent forms, audit forms, inspection forms) by clicking on a link from the Laserfiche ECM System, with specified fields already pre-filled from information already in your Laserfiche database.

Go to:  Mi-Forms Laserfiche Integration to watch the video.

Last week I attended a presentation by the NC Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services, Pesticides division about their use of our Mi-Forms mobile e-forms technology. Dwight Seal, the Western District Manager was presenting about how the Pesticides team used to follow a paper-based process when conducting field inspections. It took an average of three to four weeks for the data to get from the actual inspection to their backend systems.  In the old process, inspection reports were physically mailed twice, (first for the Managers’ review, and second for the Process Analyst’s transcription), a long queue of forms (bottleneck) stacked up at transcription, and correspondence via phone or email was required to verify the inspectors’ written information.

Using Mi-Forms electronic forms for Tablets, inspection data from the field can now sync to NCDA’s database in as fast as a day.  Managers now have the ability to review field inspection data in realtime, and transcription no longer applies.  Circling back to the inspector for data clarification is now at a bare minimum due to handwriting-to-text conversion via Digital Ink that addresses legibility concerns.  Data prefill and live validation rules addressed data accuracy and completeness concerns.

I knew all of these things, but at the Board Meeting for further funding approval, the overwhelmingly positive response was still so gratifying!  Dwight presented and demonstrated Mi-Forms and not only was it well received (resulting in additional funding for Phase III), the compliments on the solution, software, and effort to achieve the goal were abundant. Greg and I were on the receiving end of comments like “best presentation” and “money well spent”.  The decision to approve funding for Phase III took all of 2 minutes. I look forward to helping Mi-Co expand this to 49 states and DC!

The last two days have gone by in what seems like a blur. Whisking from technical session to session to exhibit hall. It’s been tough to find a minute to share a few more thoughts.

While Microsoft is nothing but consistent in message about the future of Metro style apps, the potentially overlooked topic of the conference has been improved development tools. As a developer on the Microsoft platform, I spend the majority of my day using their tool sets. It’s not uncommon for me to have 5 or more instances of Visual Studio open at once and the thing that’s always been true (at least since I’ve started developing for Windows) is that the tool chain has been top notch. So recently, when we started to delve into the world of HTML5 and JavaScript (see our latest iPad/Android slate release), it’s been a bit of a disappointment to take a giant leap backwards in tool quality. Sure Visual Studio 2010 has a built in HTML and CSS editor, but let’s be honest, these are second rate at best. And debugging requires either 3^rd party browser tools or crossing your fingers and hoping you can step through a mirror of your JS code after attaching to IE.

But now with the preview release of Visual Studio 2011, it looks like these problems are going to be a thing of the past. As an example Intellisense can correctly evaluate JavaScript objects and provide context relevant suggestions. While this might not seem like much, the evaluation that has to occur behind the scenes is pretty amazing given the dynamic nature of the language. Similarly, the ability to turn Expression Blend (a tool we admittedly need to make more use of at Mi-Co) into a mode where it actually runs your code inline and provides the ability to handle dynamic control generation is pretty fantastic.

Now, I realize that these tool chain improvements might be more interesting to me than to you the Mi-Co customer or partner, so I’ll just end this with the take away that the easier Microsoft makes it for us to produce high quality cross platform code, the better the products we can produce for you will be.

For our partners reading this, we highly encourage you to download the Windows 8 previews that are now out. Maybe install it on that HP Slate 500 you have sitting around (or whatever other touch enabled device you might have). And once done, get in touch with us and we’ll help you get Mi-Forms running on it, so you can see the current experience and provide feedback on where we might go to fully embrace the platform as it would be helpful to your use cases.

So day 1 of Microsoft Build has come and nearly gone, and it’s time to reflect on what’s shaped up to be an exciting day. At one point a speaker eluded to today as being the first day of a computing history revolution. I’m admittedly paraphrasing, but it’s interesting and while some might say I’m simply buying into the propaganda, I think Microsoft might be right about this. While it’s easy to look at the iPad and Android slates and say “they already did this”, I think that’s selling short the innovation the was on display today.

I’m not going to recap the keynote (you can watch that at www.buildwindows.com), but I’ll just say that it just seemed to “feel right”. I grew up with the command line, grew into the mouse and keyboard GUI and am just now starting to slowly adopt a new shift in usage paradigm. But the thing that Microsoft has pulled off here is that it’s not a one-size do-it-our-way-or-no-way computing model. Instead they’ve acknowledged that if you’re going to use Quicken or Excel, or more dear to my hear, Visual Studio, you’re still going to use traditional input methodologies. While at the same token, if you have an app that can be well driven by touch and hands-on usage, then hey you get to do that too. I’m sure it’ll take time for developers to get it right. To ensure they don’t force touch on people when they don’t want it, but to enable the new UI when they can use it. But assuming that hurdle can be leapt, then you’re looking at one seriously powerful OS that can span the micro devices on through the mega systems.

Most of the rest of the day was spent demonstrating all that was great about the new Metro style apps. These are basically apps that are similar in nature to what Windows Phone 7 brought to the table, but better. I’ll just leave it at that for now, but trust me they’re better. These apps will require significant rewriting of code to make use of the new UI model, but it’ll be worth it in the end. It’s likely people will be able to use more business logic from existing code bases than they think, but the UI effort will still take time to get right.

And then of course, there was the giveaway. I saw some Twitter posts likening it to an Oprah’s “Favorite Things” episode. The rumors were right. Microsoft, teaming up with Samsung gave each attendee a slate device running a development preview build of Windows 8 (as well as development preview of Visual Studio 2011). While later slates might be lower powered, they really pulled out all the stops on this one. Featuring a second generation i5 core, 1366×768 display, 4 GB of memory and a 64GB SSD drive, the device boots in about 5 seconds from a cold power off and is very snappy. The heat generated and battery life might leave a little to be desired, but as a development preview machine, it’s pretty nice.

Now of course, having seen the new Metro style apps all day, what’s the first thing we decided to do? That’s right, install Mi-Forms. The picture below shows Mi-Forms v8 with no modifications running on the slate just about 30 minutes after first powering it on. For those of you out there who’ve wanted a Windows slate platform for mobile data capture, here it is…

Don’t get me wrong, we’ll most likely fully embrace the new UI model, but it’s great to see that Microsoft hasn’t abandoned developers who’ve long been on their platform, and it’s going to be great supporting our customers in new opportunities that they bring.

Real in depth sessions start tomorrow, so come back for our take on that. But for now, good night from Microsoft Build 2011.

First, an introduction. My name is Chris DiPierro and I’m the Director of Software Development for Mi-Co. I’ve been with Mi-Co since nearly the very beginning (over 11 years ago!) and am excited to see a wide adoption of a platform we’ve been advocating for years. Sure, slates may not look like TabletPCs of old, but the goal is the same, ease of data capture in a mobile world.

To that end, a coworker (David Nakamura who’s written a few of these before) and I are at Microsoft’s Build conference this week. The sales folks have been on me for months to write a blog, so I figured what better time to start. But it became quickly apparent that this conference is going to take more than a single entry. To that end, I’m going to semi-live blog this thing and I hope you enjoy our commentary.

So, by Sunday (2 full days before the official conference start), rumors had started flying around Twitter that Microsoft might be a little further down the slate path than people would have given them credit for. This rumor took the form of speculating that attendees would be given a Windows 8 slate device of their own. By this afternoon (reading tweets on my phone on the plane), this rumor had started to grow. And then it exploded when members of the press were seen carrying “secret” Samsung bags after leaving a pre-event. By this evening, the Twitterverse was exploding not only with speculation but with people tweeting from actual Windows 8 slates. Now, I don’t know for sure that Microsoft is going to give these to everyone, but the fact that an OS build is running on real hardware means we can throw around some of our own speculation.

At the last PDC I attended, Windows 7 was the “big thing”. It was held in November 2008, and it took until October 2009 for Windows 7 to be officially released, nearly a year later. But it seems as if that might be the Microsoft of old. When you’re competing with a company like Apple, a year is an eternity. So my speculation is that if hardware and OS builds exist right now, we might very well be looking at Q1 2012 availability. I’m sure this will be a question that gets answered in the next day or two, but the prospect gets me excited. As a Microsoft partner that has built a large amount of innovative technology on their platforms, the prospect of having a native legitimate competitor within months is very attractive.

On a side note, it’s interesting to see how much mobility has changed the world. Two years ago, you might give out a few units to some folks early and it might take a week for news to break from official sites. Now someone sees a shopping bag in an elevator and the secret’s done. Microsoft is no dummy, so I’m sure they anticipated this. It’s not even started yet and Microsoft is already creating a huge buzz. Expect more of that over the rest of this week.

Thanks for stopping by and reading. Over the next week look for more of these where we discuss keynotes and session topics (which are still being kept secret for now). And maybe, if you’re good, we’ll drop a hint about what’s next at Mi-Co for Mi-Forms as well.

LIKE!:  Motion CL900 Tablet PC.  It has a very professional /” businessy” look to it; so far this is the best looking Windows semi-rugged tablet that I’ve seen.  Its thinness and light weight allow for convenient  handling, at the same time it is thick enough and heavy enough to give you that confidence to use it in harsh working environments.

Running Windows 2007, I installed the Mi-Forms Client on it, filled-out some electronic forms, and was very happy with the responsiveness and accuracy that I got.  It uploaded images on the form without delay, and has excellent ink capture.

Except for a bar code scanner, it has the right combination of bells and whistles built-in for a mobile data capture machine: a dual camera, microphone, speakers, and GPS capability.  It’s very easy to change the settings from touch to stylus (or both) and you can switch between portrait or landscape mode (I have yet to see if it can adjust automatically without prompting).   As for battery life, a full charge can get you through most of the day; I would, however prefer it to have interchangeable batteries.

Overall, I’m very impressed with this Tablet and I would recommend it without hesitation.  For some companies that I’ve talked to in the past, investing in a fit-for-purpose rugged tablet pc was a big hurdle due to the high initial cost.  With Motion’s CL900 Tablet at $899, I think it’s a steal!