Recently I had to come up with a solution for analyzing data gathered from a consumer research survey.  Imagine that a company wants to send researchers out to shopping malls and interview people to find out how much they know about a new product.  In the old days, this process would involve paper questionnaires that they would fill out for every person they interviewed, and then a long data capture process at the very end.  The company wants much faster access to analyze the results as they are gathered, so they arm the researchers with Tablet PCs.  Now the challenge is to find an application to get the data from the field researchers into the cube for analysis.

This could involve building a custom client application, but that would involve writing custom code to manage local data storage on the tablets and synch it up with a central database – too much effort.  A creative solution uses Groove forms to gather the data and rely on the built in secure synchronization so that researchers can synch up even from coffee shops with public Internet connections.  MSDN Magazine has published my article on how to build this solution, and how to use the Groove web services API to get the data from the Groove workspace into the database – see http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/05/Groove/default.aspx