Does the system function offline?

The Remote Sampler system has been deliberately designed to allow users to continue working through extended periods of interrupted connectivity.

The architecture of a typical cloud-based installation is shown below.

In this setup, it is possible for communication to be interrupted either:

between LIMS and the Remote Sampler server, or;
between the Remote Sampler server and the mobile device.

Remote Sampler assumes that connectivity can be broken at any time and to mitigate the risk of this interrupting user activity, work is always queued before transmission. When fresh work is assigned to the mobile devices in the field, the work is queued on the Remote Sampler server and is downloaded by the device when it has a data connection. Once on the device, a user can complete jobs without the need for any further interaction with the server. Any complete jobs are queued on the device and when data connectivity is resumed, the job data is transferred back to the server. No essential action in the job workflow on the device depends on a live data connection.

There are some activities on the device that do require a live data connection since they are activities that require computationally intensive processing on a third-party server. These actions are nice-to-have but not essential to enable the user to complete their work. These activities include:

Use of Google or Apple Maps to provide route navigation to job co-ordinates.
Display of live map data for viewing or selecting job locations.
Speech recognition.
Route-optimisation.

Please note that whilst Remote Sampler is highly-tolerant of interrupted communications, data connectivity is required at some point during a working day to allow complete work to be uploaded to the Remote Sampler server and fresh work to be downloaded to the mobile device.