Tauw GmbH is a part of the Tauw Group, one of the largest engineering groups and laboratories in Europe with around 1150 employees. The company, which was established in 1928 in the Netherlands, is now involved in environmental protection, environmental engineering and civil engineering. Since 2001 Tauw has been using robust notebooks from Microport. Both the colibri and its predecessor the MicroPC Pen are used for recording soil data. In addition some colibris are being used for air quality measurements.
Soil data are recorded in very computer-hostile environments outdoors and in all weathers, in industrial areas, building sites, wastelands and similar areas. In addition work with heavy material is conducted. "We defined the criteria for selection of devices very clearly". says Eric Broeksma of Tauw. "Robust design, waterproof, keyboard, quality and size of the display along with battery capacity sufficient for a day's work were decisive. The colibris also offered the required serial port, standard OS and Bluetooth". Communications between GSM and Colibri and between the barcode scanner and colibri were conducted by Bluetooth, so there was no need to fiddle with cables.
Because the company systems were recently upgraded to Windows XP, we also wanted to upgrade our 27 colibris Windows XP. This allows us to use the same programs VLK, Boris, Inmeten, BSP and Dim on the colibris and laptops. The software used to record and process the soil data has been specially developed by Tauw and has the optimum design for the requirements and the interaction with the robust hardware.
