Scenario: Introducing resource management

A teacher called Lars works at two universities and is involved in several courses. Since he is traveling quite a lot he has a PC-laptop on which he works at home in-between offices and sometimes he uses it for projection when teaching.

Regularly he works in one of his offices on UNIX-machines the university provides. Contrary to what you could expect he has no problem keeping his work synchronized between different operating systems, hardware and physical machines. He isn't a computer illiterate but not an expert either. This works since he has a personal portfolio that he brings with him on the laptop, whenever he is connected to the network the portfolio is synchronized against the two universities portfolio systems.

Part of his portfolio is marked as public and can be inspected by others, actually for each course he participates in he has a dedicated catalog in which he can add information directed to the students. The student on the other hand imports the teachers dedicated catalog as a sub-portfolio allowing them to easy keep an eye on course news and material.

Typically Lars produces various documents such as lecture notes and examples for the students consumption. Whenever he constructs a document he chooses formats which he can work with across his different work environments. This has as a consequence that his students will have less problems with documents they can't read in their environment.

When he creates a document he does it in a program on the local system, when done he saves it within his portfolio which can be done in at least two ways. Either he saves his document locally and then uploads it through a web-interface or his portfolio is visible directly in the file-system as a regular catalog, if so he just saves it directly to that catalog (or some of the sub-catalogs).

When the day is over he synchronizes his portfolio on the laptop against the days work and can continue to work at home, on the the train, etc. Next time he is connected with his network portfolio it's automatically updated if necessary (i.e if changed).

Features

• Network portfolio accessible everywhere.
• Portable, the network portfolio can be mirrored locally (synchronized) and brought everywhere.
• Independent of systems and machines.
• It has public and private parts.
• Portfolios can be aggregated from several other portfolios or part of portfolios.