The USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) is focusing on the future by developing and implementing desktop GIS for office and field use. NRCS mandated that future information technology solutions be based on third party vendor software and not custom application development. Currently, a common computing environment has been developed for NRCS, Farm Service Agency, and Rural Development. The Customer Service Toolkit is a business process reengineering project within the USDA Field Service Center initiative that will deliver new tools for common computing environment users. The Customer Service Toolkit software integration project is defining a software architecture that supports desktop GIS integrated with Microsoft's Outlook, Office 97, and BackOffice products. CST is designed to allow USDA employees to access and share customer-specific tabular, spatial, word processing, and spreadsheet documents in a field office service center. The software architecture facilitates and tests emergent strategies dealing with mobile disconnected computing. Design and implementation issues include laptop data storage, data sharing, long transactions, digital orthophotography compression, gateway data distribution, and other emergent mobile computing problems.