Software Idea, should this be developed?
 

A friend I owe some software development hours too asked if I would write a program that would transfer selected
contacts out of MS Outlook into a GPS device (Garmin, TomTom etc. ).
Order them by the nearest to furthest in geographical order and produce a few reports in the process.

He swears this would save his staff countless hours each week.

I Goog’d to see if one existed, but found nothing, I was pretty surprised.
I’m not into sales but if anyone else here is? How do you handle route planning?

If anyone knows about a program that does this I would appreciate it, would rather buy than write.

First check for a patent.

And then change that code a wee bit and go. Patents are basically useless. Big money takes what it wants anytime, anywhere. Creating an image of your offering and getting copyrights and trademarks is faster, cheaper and more effective.

That's a great idea, unfortunately current version of MS Street & Trips does this already, sort of (see below).
It will allow you to import addresses from outlook, xls, access, and a few others.

Although going through the import process it does not allow you to select the contacts you want to import. It automatically selects all of them, so you would have to import them and manually remove the ones that aren't needed.

Now depending on the GPS make/model you may need to save the street & trips as a .est file and import it into another program that talks to the GPS, because I don't think that Streets & Trips allows you to directly upload it to many GPS models.

Another option is to export your contact list to an .xls format, edit what you don't want imported, import the .xls file into Streets & Trips or another GPS utility.

I use a program called GPS Utility to upload my customer info into the GPS (Garmin Nuvi 770) this allows me to create routes with the contact info.

You can download a 60 day trial of Streets & Trips to test.

Hope this helps, let me know if you need anything, I've been down this road :confused:

Thankfully the US is a “first to conceive” country dealing with patents, I own several patents already.
We have already dealt with the “first to conceive” issue a while back using standard means.

Rob, thanks for posting, will check that program out!

Blackberry does the exact same thing
either manually via Desktop Manager
or automated via BES : it ain't rocket science, it's a simple MAPI call to the exchange server

I'm pretty sure my Realtor has a piece of software that performs functionality like this. We'll hand him a list of a dozen houses, and he'll show up with a complete googlemap package. Now, I've seen him attempt to lay out routes by hand, and it's pretty painful, so I think he must have a Realtor-tool for doing this.

Dan

Do it and license it under the GPL...