| Abstract: | Most people use more than one computing system for their daily work: an office computer, a corporate laptop for travel, and a private desktop computer. These machines not only differ in their power and resources but also in their environment, including deployed applications, available files, and so on. The current trend is leading to an even greater number of devices and a wider range of capabilities. This presents a major challenge to enabling the vision of the mobile user and worker. This article shows how recent developments in the area of service-oriented computing, embedded devices, and networking will enable user-specific virtual working and private environments on the basis of new approaches toward distributed operating systems. These service-oriented operating systems will extend the limited capabilities of local devices with (remote) resource pools, aimed at provisioning identical (or similar) environments in any context and location. As we explain, henceforth, future employee workspaces will concentrate much more on mobility, while the actual resources (computational power, storage, data) will be maintained through dedicated corporate server farms, thus greatly reducing the administration effort and enhancing the user experience. |
