The Internet has brought the spirit of global communication and collaboration to nurses and other healthcare professionals in ways never before thought possible. These resources are offered to expand your opportunities for discussion, reference, education, and research.
Organization and portability are wonderful things. The diskette drive has pretty much gone the way of the dinosaur and USB drives are the new norm. While searching for applications that would run from my pen drive I came across a site called "S.O.A.P. on a Rope" by Kathy Schrock (http://kathyschrock.net/soap/).
Kathy is a technology coordinator for a school system on Cape Cod and presents a plan for packaging Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org), Firefox, and Thunderbird (both at http://www.mozilla.org/) on a combination MP3 player/FM radio/voice recorder/data drive!! The project was inspired by the fact that many students did not have Microsoft Office at home to continue work started at school. I feel this approach would work equally well for nursing faculty, students, clinical nurses, and nurse managers. All of these applications are open source software and free for the downloading.
"S.O.A.P," by the way, stands for "Student's Own Applications Personally." The versions of Open Office and FireFox/Thunderbird have some custom tweaks to run on a removable drive, but she lists the URLs of the customized applications.
What else could could I put on the drive that would benefit a student/educator/clinician/administrator? Perhaps a Personal Information Manager (PIM) and a small database would be useful tools.
When looking for applications that could run from removable media such as USB drives, you need to find programs that are self-contained, and do not write alterations or files to the Windows registry. Most education and corporate desktop computers are configured to not allow the user to install software to protect against viruses, so they must run totally from the removable drive.
The Portable Freeware Collection (http://www.portablefreeware.com/about.php) is a great site that lists only programs that meet the self-contained requirements to make them truly mobile applications.
Two Personal Information Managers are Essential PIM (http://www.essentialpim.com/) Portable version and ChaosManager (http://www.chaosmanager.net/). Both of these applications offer appointment calendars, notes, and address books, and are free for the downloading. More feature-rich versions are available for sale, but I am thinking of the frugal student here. Both of these applications offer the option to encrypt your information, especially valuable since the portability of these devices also makes them easy to lose or get stolen.
While Excel or the Open Office equivalent Calc can work very nicely as a flat file database, they can also have a significant learning curve. I found a couple of small, simple information managers that are worth a look.
Treepad Lite (http://treepad.com/treepadfreeware/) has been around for several years and has undergone continuous upgrade. There are several fee-based versions on the Web site, but the Lite version will fit many people's needs. It is very small (less than 500K), yet can hold huge amounts of information. It looks somewhat like Windows Explorer with individual titles or major groupings of titles on the left and the detailed view on the right. A companion program called the Free exe-eBook Creator (http://www.exe-ebookcreator.com/) allows you to publish your database as a stand-alone electronic book for individual distribution.
The free version of treepad stores text information only. The fee-based versions add much more functionality by being able to store images and hyperlinks, and use drag and drop to add documents to the database.
Tree DBNotes Free (http://www.softviewer.com/treedbnotes/free_index.htm) is similar in functionality but offers many more features, including word processor compatibility, encryption, and facility to open multiple databases at one time. At 8MB, it requires more drive space than other programs, so you will need to decide if the increased functionality is worth taking up a considerably larger chunk of USB drive real estate.
Have fun exploring these applications. Get organized and portable!!
Contributed by
William Perry, MA, RN