Putting DatePak to use for your team
Get at least one copy of DatePak for your team, and assign at least one team member to create DatePak files.
All sorts of events can be shared - hospital teaching schedules, team meetings, local social events, and of course national organisations that want to advertise cheaply.
Sharing the files is easy and self-perpetuating. Of course, you could place a copy on your website, as there is on the next page. But once one user has it on their handheld computer, they can beam it to any other user with a similar machine (ie Palm-compatible beams to a Palm-compatible, and a Pocket PC beams to a Pocket PC). Perhaps the smartest way to share a teaching timetable is to beam it to the attendees of a session, and ask that they share it with colleagues that had not attended. It is always a surprise how quickly random corridor encounters between clinicians lead to every team member having a copy of such a file.
Creating this application cost just $24.95 and 30 minutes. In this case, I copied and pasted the events from a Word file. Most local teaching diaries start out as Word or Excel documents, and copying and pasting from these is straight forward. Assign one person in the department to do this once, and everyone will benefit.
DatePak also has time-saving import functions. For example, in Outlook, click on the Calendar icon. Then, from the File menu, click on Import and Export, and select Export to a file. The list includes Comma Separated Values (Windows), and choosing that produces a file that DatePak can import.
Screenshot of "Export to File" dialog in Outlook on a PC
Finally, for programmers out there, DatePak's data file format is XML. The full DTD is simple, so your program can easily produce files that are already in the correct format. The user only needs DatePak for the final step of building the Palm-compatible application from the data file.
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