The iPad Estimator Project

In January 2011 we were tasked by a forward thinking construction company to create a mobile web application for them. This was to run, primarily on the iPad and was designed to manage the lead generation and tracking, customer management and to schedule and create on-site estimates and manage the job approval and scheduling process. There was a requirement to interact with an existing Exchange server to integrate scheduling information from the web. At each step there would be emails sent to the client, the job manager and the group scheduler account on exchange server as well as calendar events created that could be viewed on mobile devices.

The killer feature was to be the ability to gather a client signature on-site and store it with the estimate.

The primary concerns were that the application had to perform over a 3G network and be usable from desktop computers as well. There would be varying levels of employee interaction from receptionists taking lead information on desktop computers, estimators on site creating estimates with their iPad’s and administrators managing employee information and scheduling contractors.

We decided to create this application in Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC 3 using Razor as the View language Javascript and JQuery for Client side interactions, C# for the server side language and SQL server 2005 for the database.

After presenting our visual mock ups and prototypes to the client were were assigned the contract and got to work.

The results are below.

The Home page showing main menu choices and visual indication of tasks that need attention.

Interactive search page with Ajax interactive search box.

Draw your signature using you finger or a pen

Editing up to 14 job steps via an interactive JQuery grid