Mike Flynn

Satchel: providing access to any document, any time, anywhere

Current solutions for providing access to electronic documents while away from the office do not meet the special needs of mobile document workers. We describe ”Satchel,“ a system that is designed specifically to support the distinctive features of mobile document work. Satchel is designed to meet the following five high-level design goals (1) easy access to document services; (2) timely document access; (3) streamlined user interface; (4) ubiquity; and (5)compliance with security policies. Our current prototype uses a Nokia 9000 Communicator as the mobile device; it communicates to the rest of the Satchel system using wireless communications, both infrared and radio. A fundamental Satchel concept is the use of tokens, or small secure references, to represent documents on the mobile device. The mobile client only transmits small tokens over te wireless channels, leaving the wired network to transmit the contents of documents when, and only when, they are required. Another fundmental Satchel concept is the highly speclized and context-sensitive user interface on the mobile device. The users interactions ae streamlined because of this specialization and though the use of contextual information gained by uing infrared communications. We report the results of a trial of Satchel that was carried out within our own company, and discuss how well Satchel met our design goals. We call Satchel a ”document appliance” because it provides a streamlined soultion to the problem of remote document access—it aims to support only a limited set of activities, but supports them very well.

The Satchel system architecture: mobile access to documents and services

Mobile professionals require access to documents and document‐related services, such as printing, wherever they may be. They may also wish to give documents to colleagues electronically, as easily as with paper, face‐to‐face, and with similar security characteristics. The Satchel system provides such capabilities in the form of a mobile browser, implemented on a device that professional people would be likely to carry anyway, such as a pager or mobile phone. Printing may be performed on any Satchel‐enabled printer, or any fax machine. Scanning, too, may be accomplished at any Satchel‐enabled scanner. Access rights to individual documents may be safely distributed, without regard to document formats. Access to document services is greatly simplified by the use of context sensitivity. The system has been extensively tested and evaluated. This paper describes the architecture of the Satchel system.

Studies of mobile document work and their contributions to the Satchel project

This paper provides a retrospective account of the field studies, questionnaire surveys and user trials we carried out during our Satchel research project. Satchel is a system that supports mobile document work by providing streamlined access to documents and document services. We describe each study and present illustrative results to show how each one contributed to the overall success of the research project. More specifically, we describe how each study affected the design of our Satchel prototypes and the design of the scenarios that were used as communication tools during the course of the project. We analyse the relative value of each of the studies and trials, concentrating on cost factors such as research effort, expenses, and amount of subject time required. Although we acknowledge that not all research projects will be able to include such a wide number or variety of user studies, we hope that our analysis will provide useful information for other research projects.