Business forms for PDAs, phones and PCs

magic5 Enterprise Edition enables you to replace your paper forms with easy-to-use yet powerful PDA forms. Benefits include :

• Reduced turnaround time between completing your work and submitting your 'paperwork'
• No need to type up paper forms or re-enter data
• Capture customer signatures and authorisation
• Reduced printing, paper and stationery costs
• Online access to authorised reports for your clients
• A smart, professional image for your business
• Fast, consistent, uniform entry of data

magic5 Enterprise Edition allows you to easily define your own forms. Typically this may be a job sheet, a timesheet, an invoice, a stock/part usage form, a proof of delivery form, an inventory, an inspection, audit or assessment.

You don't need any experience of programming or to be a technical guru, as long as you've used the Internet you'll be fine !
Or, if you want a quick start or some advice, just ask us and we'll get you up and running quickly.

Generally you'll want to use things like tick boxes and drop-down lists where possible. This makes the forms fast and easy to complete.

You install magic5 Enterprise Edition on a server within your organisation's network. Typically this would be on a server running Microsoft Windows 2003 Server, but it could even be a Windows XP machine. Once the software is installed you can create accounts allowing your colleagues to complete forms on their PDAs and clients to login and view reports that you've released for them. To help with completing forms you can also setup customers and locations, and general purpose lists for drop-down boxes and multiple choice questions. You may wish to use the "Job Dispatch" module of magic5, allowing you to log and allocate jobs using the magic5 web site - PDA users can receive their job lists, view all relevant information, complete the associated form and obtain customer sign-off. Forms completed on the PDA may be supported by an unlimited number of photos, and all photos will become part of the completed report. Depending on how you like to work, reports can automatically be e-mailed to whoever you like, or maybe you'll grant online access to your clients. In addition, you may wish to output data to a Microsoft Access database, allowing spreadsheets to be created easily. magic5 Enterprise Edition is particularly suitable if you wish to link magic5 in with an existing system, either for sending job information down to PDAs or for receiving completed forms (or both).

Costs are based on one-off server and user licence fees. More details

You need to have a PDA running Windows Mobile (versions 2003, 5 or 6). You'll probably want to send and receive forms and data over the mobile phone network - this would be charged as data traffic by your network provider. Companies such as O2 have data packages available which give very large data bundles for less than £10 per month.

The functionality and options available are identical between the two editions. The difference is purely down to whether you would like the magic5 web site and database to be running within your own organisation or whether you'd us to run them for you. The two editions also have different pricing structures. There is no fundamental reason for choosing one edition rather than the other, but costs will generally be lower in the long run if you choose Enterprise Edition. If you wish to link magic5 in with an external system then it would usually be advisable to use Enterprise Edition rather than Hosted Edition, but this is not an absolute rule.

No. If you wish to purchase then please e-mail us. Once we receive a Purchase Order or other authorisation from you we'll supply you with the magic5 software and documentation, together with a licence key for the number of user licences that you have purchased

Yes. If you register for our free trial you'll see a set of forms relating to job sheets, proof of delivery etc. You can take one of these forms "as-is" or use it as a basis for your own form.

We don't supply PDAs as there is no way we can give you a cheaper deal than people like the network operators O2, Orange, Vodafone etc. These companies offer Windows Mobile PDAs along with their phone contracts and that is usually the best way to acquire a PDA (especially if you're interested in e-mailing completed forms over the mobile phone network and hence need a data package anyway). If you need something more rugged than one of those PDAs then you might want to look at Motorola (who now own Symbol), Psion and, as a halfway house, Otterbox.