OT : PDA networking

I have a requirement to be able to network 20 PDA's (Pocket PC's) in
order that they can communicate with a laptop, wirelessly.

What I need, is for the PDA users to be able to type some text into
Pocket Word, and save it as a document onto a laptop.

Is it possible to set up PDA's in such a way so that they have write
access to a folder on a 'remote' computer, bearing in mind that there
will be 20 PDA's all wanting to send documents to *one* laptop.

I suppose it could be considered an ad-hoc type of network?

The scenario is that each user will be listening to a speech, and,
instead of interrupting the speaker, they can type out a question (via a
PDA keyboard) which can then be saved as a document on a laptop used by
the speakers assistant. The assistant can then peruse the questions, and
pass the most appropriate ones to the speaker to answer.

I really will appreciate any positive help anyone can give me, TIA

On Sun, 9 Oct 2005 19:10:31 +0100, ComPCs
<(E-Mail Removed)> scrawled:

>I really will appreciate any positive help anyone can give me, TIA

If I were to be doing that I would maybe look at using a PC as a
server type of machine rather than having 20 PDA's all accessing one
laptops wireless card. The other thing I would maybe look at would be
instant messaging instead of a Word document as there is the
possibility of people forgetting to save and also the thing of you
can't really have 20 people writing to one document AFAIK. (If you can
I wouldn't like to trust it to work too reliably).
--
Stuart @ SJW Electrical

Please Reply to group

well, you can get PDAs that work with wifi, hence it's possible to do
it. you'd just set up your laptop as an ad-hoc wireless network and
connect to that. ad-hoc networking's more trouble than it's worth
unless you have zero cash or a specific reason to do it peer to peer.
it'll be clunky as hell though and you'll struggle if people want to
simultaneously write to the same document on the same share...
i'd suggest you get a wireless access point and connect that to the
laptop, and then connect to that with the PDAs.
your life will be made *hugely* easier if you get someone to knock up a
web front end to a webserver on the laptop, so questions can be posted
to the laptop from any browser on that network, and create a backend to
collate those responses and process them in whatever way you want - i'd
suggest for your purpose they don't need to end up as text files, but
rather a list of specific questions on a web page that the assistant
can look at.
if you can find an average comp sci student they could probably knock
it up in PHP in an afternoon or so, and then *any* device with a web
browser can use it.
if you use something cool like NoCat then you can have each PDA get
your data entry page redirected to the screen when it connects to your
network automagically.

there's quite a few commercial implementations of this type of system,
either internally or externally over the net: webex, MS livemeeting and
possibly sharepoint spring to mind, and i'm sure you could find no end
of systems on sourceforge in various stages of development that are
free.

hope this helps,
ric