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A. BrightXpress Mobility Suite is a powerful software development platform for creating end-to-end enterprise mobility solutions. It provides the essential enterprise mobility development tools within the platform: BrightBuilder, an easy-to-use drag-and-drop mobile application designer; BrightServer, a robust and highly scalable server product to integrate into business systems and extend/mobilize business data to field device;, and BrightForms, a powerful forms engine for rich occasionally connected or always-on (“online”) mobile applications with built-in camera, signature capture, barcode scanner, GPS, mobile printing support.
A. BrightXpress Mobility Suite helps you create business mobile solutions much quicker in weeks with much smaller development teams compared to standard traditional software developments tools currently available in the market. It helps you eliminate the technology and business risks. In short it saves you money by reducing the development time and the skill set of the development team for the initial development of the solution, and the maintenance and updates in the long term.
A. Anyone with mobility requirements in any industry can use BrightXpress Mobility Suite to mobilize its field force to remove the paper based business processes, streamline automatic data collection, eliminate double data entry, optimize and automate the backend data administration into back office systems.
You do not need to be a fully trained computer programmer to create solutions using Bright Mobility Suite. BrightBuilder Mobile Application Designer provides easy to understand and learn application development environment for quickly creating business forms and deploying remote field devices.
A. Please click here for the system requirements.
A. BrightXpress™ can be used to develop solutions for any mobile work force, such as for sales teams, service technicians, remote asset management, health workers, inspection (regulatory, OH&S), insurance claims processing, logistics, transports, delivery, warehouse management and stock control.
BrightXpress Mobility Suite can be used in any situation where data is being collected in the field, and needs to be sent back to a central location. It can be used to eliminate paper forms and data re-entry, faxing, unnecessary mobile calls to base and allows businesses to move their data in a more efficient manner.
A. No! You do not need any other software to mobile your backend data stored in databases and files. BrightServer Mobile Data Gateway has built-in features to detect the incremental changes in your backend data and send only the changed data to remote field devices. In the same fashion, BrightServer is able to store the data into your backend database tables and files based on the configuration that you create using BrightBuilder through BEP projects.
BrightServer provides a very powerful JavaScript based user defined scripting mechanism to handle integration into backend systems via, for instance, web services, XML file exchange. Server side business logic can be implemented for collecting and mobilizing business data from various sources, and in the similar fashion re-distribute the field collected data back into the different backend systems. Advanced users can write their own mobile data producers and consumers.
A. No! BrightServer Mobile Data Gateway is able to find the changes in your backend database tables and files without the need for a store and forward database. Just configure your BrightServer project to make the database tables and files without worrying about system fields etc. BrightServer will do the hard work for you out of the box.
A. Virtually nothing. Just configure BrightServer with correct database details, and BrightServer will handle the rest automatically.
A. BrightXpress™ provides direct support for the following databases: MS SQL Server, Oracle, IBM DB2, MySQL, and ODBC Data Sources. Alternatively advanced users are able to directly enter a JDBC connection string and specify your own JDBC driver details.
A. Yes! You can even mobilize your file based business processes to the field devices. A special built-in feature in BrightServer will allow you specify the file content to be synchronized to the field devices. BrightServer is able to detect any changes (additions, modifications, deletions) and send the changed data to the field devices. You can even have different files for different remote users in the field. Likewise the data coming from the field devices can be put into the files of your choice in the format you design including the ability to store data on a user basis.
A. Yes! You can use the powerful scripting mechanism provided by BrightServer to implement server side business logic. Scripts are implemented using JavaScript. For instance you can create a script job that can be configured to run on a regular interval or a Cron based schedule to implement regular housekeeping, reporting, data collection and distribution. Using scripts, you can define your own sync data sources and destinations to implement complex integration tasks.
A. This can be easily achieved through scripting available on the server. You can implement data sync sources and destinations in JavaScript. In response to data reads and writes from remote devices, in your scripts you can communicate with other backend systems to get and send data over web services. Scripting provides you with the flexibility to choose your integration technique depending on the business requirements.
A. First download and install our mobile application bundle which contains BrightBuilder Mobile Application Designer, BrightServer Mobile Data Gateway and BrightForms Mobile Device Engine desktop and Windows Mobile Editions. Create a BSP BrightForms project using BrightBuilder; define your application forms and data model. BrightBuilder provides a very easy to drag-and-drop application development environment for non-programmers.
The Tutorials included in this document also contains a range of examples to assist creating basic applications.
A. You use BrightBuilder to create BrightServer BEP projects. It is all visual and drag-and-drop to set up the server data sources and destinations. Server data sources can be relational database based from one or multiple databases, JavaScript based user defined script sources and destinations, or simple flat files. For the runtime configuration such as configuring users, deploying licenses, you can use BrightBuilder to configure a remote server instance over an Internet connection. You can download a server configuration to a file, modify offline and upload the changes later.
For more information, please refer to the Configuring BrightServer chapter of this document.
A. . As of Version 6, BrightServer BEP projects do not contain the “Server”, “Users” and “Licenses” nodes. They are runtime configuration elements, and, hence, they are considered not suitable to be a part of the design time configuration of a server. Server parameters, user accounts and licenses are now configured through the Servers panel as the server runtime configuration elements. You just need to connect to a server instance and access these configuration elements through the “Configuration” node. Check out the how-to videos on managing server configuration in the How-To Videos section.
A. On the server side, BrightServer Mobile Data Gateway runs on all Windows platforms on Linux.
On the client side, BrightForms Device Engines are available on Windows Mobile based devices, on all desktop Windows platforms, Android, and iOS.
BrightBuilder Mobile Application Designer can be installed and run on all Windows platforms. Product datasheets are available online here.
A. The handheld devices running BrightForms connect to BrightServer on HTTP or secure HTTPS ports using web services technology over the Internet protocol. By using web services technology over Internet protocol, BrightServer is able to co-exist in the widest variety of infrastructure environments .
A. After downloading BrightXpress Mobility Suite developer, Bright Software provides a 30 day developer support. The Bright Software support team will help and answer your technical questions via email at no cost during the evaluation period.
Also this website contains numerous how-to videos and demo applications, taken from real-world applications, and posted by Bright Software developers. The most frequently asked questions will be added to this FAQ.
Bright Software also offer introductory web-based training sessions to answer question and provides you with the initial training of the platform which will get you started.
A. This is also sometimes referred as just “server token”. Each BrightServer instance is identified by a unique text token created by BrightServer depending on the hardware configuration it is installed on. BrightXpress Mobility Suite licenses are generated based on this unique server token. BrightServer displays this unique token when it is started in the server log. It may also be retrieved via the System Info node of the server in BrightBuilder. You need this unique token to request and generate licenses.
For more information on this process, please refer to the Licensing BrightServer chapter of this document.
A. After receiving your license, you need to connect to your server instance using BrightBuilder. Start your BrightBuilder, connect to your server instance using BrightBuilder’s “Servers” panel. Download the configuration through the Configuration node; add the license using the Licenses node. And finally upload the changes to the server using the Configuration node “Upload” menu option. There are detailed tutorials and how-to videos available that take you through this process.
For more information, please refer to the Licensing BrightServer chapter of this document.
A. This is possible through third party Device Management software products. For instance, these products help ensure access only to the applications approved on remote devices. It also helps you control the setup and configuration and the availability of selected device functionality on the device.