Carl
the CADMan
Carl is an electrical engineer who designs circuits for a
small Silicon Valley electronics firm. His company pays for Carl and
his co-workers to connect through WorkNode to ORCAD, their principal
CAD software application, because it's more economical for them to do
that than maintain the software on-site. Carl and most of his
co-workers use WorkNode only to connect to ORCAD and maybe some other
applications; they don't use it for email or web hosting, since that's
all handled on the company's network.
Carl doesn't travel
often or work at home; but he generally works on designs together with
different teams at work. They need to be able to see each other's work
and in some cases, to modify it. Carl spends lots of time (8-10 hours a
day) using this CAD program from a pretty good PC workstation in his
cubicle. Reaction speed and application performance are very important
to him. So is security, since these designs represent key company IP.
... an extension:
The fabrication group at Carl's company uses another piece of software,
also WorkNode-hosted, which talks to ORCAD, the circuit design
software. WorkNode's arrangement supports passing Carl's ORCAD design
back and forth to Joe's fabrication software.
Tony the Telecommuter
Tony lives in Manchester where his wife has a good job,
but works for a company in Silicon Valley. He spends perhaps one week a
month in San Jose, but the rest of the time he works out of his home
office in Manchester. He can't get DSL yet, so he has to rely on a
modem connection to his company's site. Some of what he does can be
offline, but not everything; and he frequently feels isolated from the
group that's onsite. ...
Sandra
the Self-Employed Landscape Designer
Sandra has just gone into business for herself, using a
home office. She buys time on the landscape software she learned to use
in school through WorkNode because there's no way she could afford it
on her own at this stage. She also uses WorkNode to host her business
website and handle her email, because her company has a pretty small
margin and she's very cost-conscious. In the future, she hopes her
business will grow and she'll probably want more functionality in these
domains (email and web hosting) than WorkNode provides.
Although she does the bulk of her hard-core development
in her home office, Sandra does travel quite a bit; she has to visit
sites which may be in her neighborhood or across the state, and in
those locations she needs to work, and to give online / interactive
presentations to her clients - showing walkthroughs of their site plans
and allowing them to suggest changes and modify them on the spot. She
might need to connect through a random phone line (or wireless modem)
on a new site, or through someone's firewall within a company. Both of
these means of connection must be reliable, even if they aren't
super-fast. She's willing to download things beforehand to make sure
she'll be able to make a presentation and edit a project a bit while
offline.
Theresa
the Teacher
Theresa is a professor in Lo-Tech U's mechanical
engineering department. She wants to provide her students with access
to state-of-the-art versions of several applications they'll use in
industry when they graduate, but with university funding being what it
is, there's no way she can provide licensed copies to all the students.
There's also a concern with the students bootlegging the software.
The software
manufacturers are sympathetic to her problem (they'd like to influence
this impressionable young market) but it's logistically expensive for
them to provide free or cheap software to every university in the
country. Keeping it up to date is even worse.
However, they've found a
great solution. They can offer student access to their software through
WorkNode, for a greatly discounted rate. The software company and the
university split a small fee to WorkNode that pays for hosting the
software. The software company makes no direct profit on the deal, but
gains a lot of customers.
WorkNode offers a
special kind of site-service which is a Class Site. The class's teacher
creates the site, and authorizes a list of login ID's, a list of
accessable applications and a usage cap (depending on the deal) for
each user ID. Each student gets a sub-site within the Class Site where
they keep their work. The teacher can look at all of these sites, but
other students can't. The Class Site also includes a public area where
the teacher can create a showcase for the student projects, and course
documentation. The university (department or prof's teaching account)
is not billed, although they probably have to sign something to endorse
the school's use of the site and get the free application usage.This
makes it much more feasible for the teacher to be able to use the
service in a lightweight, reconfigurable way, since academic
administrators move very slowly on things like this. However, in some
circumstances the school might need to pay for part of the service, in
which case there would probably be some kind of joint billing.
[The teacher scenario comes out of my own experience
trying to teach a course online, when the university in question wasn't
quite up to speed in web hosting and couldn't afford an IS group. It
would have been really great to farm out the logistical part of it, and
the application hosting would have been even better.]
[A similar scenario might work with secondary schools.
Here, a big perk might be the fact that a lot of secondary schools have
to make do with a motley collection of computers, mix of Macs and PC's
of different vintages; these are tough to give a consistent setup.
However, through a WorkNode site, the system administrator would only
have to make sure they have net access and a browser. From there,
everyone accesses their own account and the same set of tools,
configured as the teacher chooses; but without any appreciable network
expertise required.]
Barney
the Business Traveler
Barney is a licensing
rep for a big company, and is on the road all the time. He has all the
usual electronic comm devices: laptop, cell phone, pager, wireless PDA
and even a GPS he keeps in his rentacar to help find his way around in
strange cities.
Barney uses Powerpoint
and Excel (and has no particular desire to learn linux) but aside from
that he mainly just needs to be connected - get and send messages from
anywhere and be on top of a few key websites, and without booting up
the computer all the time. (He also likes to check his stock at a high
frequency, and be warned when something relevant happens). He'd like to
be able to give presentations easily from a client site, just by
bringing up a web page from one of their computers; but the way his
company's firewall is set up, it's a real pain to access anything
unofficial from outside its firewall.
WorkNode can help here
by hosting his presentation on a website external to both firewalls,
but browser-accessible from both sites. But, he wants to run that
presentation on WorkNode software because the local company might not
have the same versions. [How else can WorkNode help Barney?]
Sally
the Scientist
Sally is a research
scientist, working in a university setting or an industry lab. She has
a lot of freedom and sophistication in setting up her computer system,
prefers linux to windows (although she often co-writes papers with
diehard windows users), and tends to work physically in a lot of
different locations - her office at work, her kitchen table at home, in
hotel rooms at conferences, in friends' homes, on the airplane. When
traveling, which she does a few times a month, she likes to check mail
a couple of times a day; and she has to dial a long distance number to
access the net, so she'd like to keep those mobile accesses short. She
feels more comfortable having local executables of the applications she
uses most frequently since her network access is so often tenuous.
Sally uses a lot of
different applications - scientific, word processing, presentations,
photoshop and even management. She mixes her personal and work computer
uses freely - her home remodeling plans are on her laptop right next to
the research paper she's working on. She often goes months or even
years without using some application, but then needs it "right now" for
some special job.
She can't really justify
paying full price out of her cramped research budget for such things,
but WorkNode allows her the luxury of such "dabbling" for a moderate
price. WorkNode also allows her to "try out" applications she
thinks she might like to have around all the time or use in her
teaching, but doesn't want to make the investment in until she's really
explored them. Sometimes for short trips or when she's trying to leave
her work behind, she'd like to leave her laptop behind too; but really
needs to keep up with her email and voice mail (again, preferably
without calling a long-distance access number). She'd like to use her
palm pilot for this.
Frank
the Family Man
Frank is a house husband, who is raising his and his
wife's two children while writing a book. He's based pretty much at
home, travels occasionally but doesn't need to be connected when he
does. However, he does want to keep in touch with his friends and
family on email, keep up his family's website with lots of pictures of
the kids (which for privacy reasons he'd like to only let authorized
friends and family see), and do a little desktop publishing and web
research relating to the book he's writing.
[How can WorkNode
help Frank?]
|
