Traditionally, transferring the collected surveyed data was always a time consuming and a costly task. With Episurveyor being an open source tool, the task of transferring data back to a desktop or web server is easy and cost effective. The user requires no expensive consultants, software subscriptions or any of those complicated long-term contracts. Before Epicentre survey data management required skilled person to carry out the survey and store the data. However, this solution allows creation of surveys using the desktop application and seamlessly publishing them to the handheld devices. Data can be collected by field agents on their PDA's in the offline mode and can be synced to desktop application at convenience. The solution helps in eliminating the paper chain and making the entire process fast, efficient and free of error. These features of Episurveyor had made it popular even in these competitive times.
Episurveyor was developed to give its users that open source software which will allow them to easily create a generic data entry form, collect data on Palm, Windows mobile & J2ME device and then transfer the data back to a desktop or upload to web server for analysis. Solution should be generic so that surveys can be designed for wide range of organization like U.N. organizations, Hospitals etc.
The developers of Episurveyor also added several enhancements in the features of the tool. The bugs were resolved out to give a clean application for its users. The developers went on to release upgraded versions of Episurveyor which was a enhanced tool in the later releases. The technologies used in perfecting the application were Java 1.4 or higher, JSP, Superwaba & MySQL for providing the world class solution. A web edition of Episurveyor was made available that is similar to a desktop edition and the Windows mobile edition that parallel to the Palm version. Some of the enhanced features that was upgraded to the application to reach to a world class standard is the installation of Episurveyor to PDA from desktop. The Personal Digital Assistants as we know allows the users to import and export data, store information. The survey data can thus be handled seamlessly with this feature of the Episurveyor.
The survey activities mainly consist of many questions and this is one of the many critical points for a successful survey and this solution features a solution that introduces new types of questions for an accurate survey. The enhanced version of the application is has an improved publish mechanism and popup keyboards on device, allowing user to save survey specifications etc.
The Episurveyor is appropriate a solution for creating generic surveys for wide range of industries from desktop or web application. Surveys thus created can be published to Palm & Windows mobile devices and can be downloaded on J2ME devices. Survey data can be collected on different devices and transferred to desktop or can be uploaded on the web server. Data collected can be analyzed and exported to various formats like html, mdb. It can be archived also from desktop/laptop.