Portal for Groups: More Than One Way to Run a Sync
Initially, Portal was intended for people with two Macs who want to keep them in sync, with no thought beyond that need. After some thought, it became apparent that once Mac-to-Mac sync was taken care of (and made very easy), other syncing possibilities pop up. This has come up once or twice in earlier forum discussions about Portal , so I thought I’d try to flesh it out deliberately in a new post. Here’s what I’ve thought of so far:
Classroom Sync: Suppose you have a classroom environment where you want to keep several Macs in sync with one, “teacher” Mac. Portal would let the “teacher” Mac distribute handouts, calendars, etc. to all the classroom Macs. Changes made to specified files on the classroom Macs might automatically sync back to the “teacher” Mac at predesignated times, so the teacher can grade them.
Workgroup Sync: Similar to the Classroom model, but with sync to all of the workgroup Macs, instead of only back and forth to the “teacher” Mac. This would be ideal for small businesses and laboratories where information needs to be shared between systems continuously. Data folders in labs could be synced in real-time to all the other local systems and all the laptops for the workers in the lab. This way, there is a continuous distributed backup and all the workers always have the most up to date data. Businesses working on specific projects could sync all the related files and documents for that project to all those employees working on that project. All these situations would probably benefit from calendar sync, address book sync, etc.
Ad Hoc Sync:Perhaps you’re a college student and you’ve got to do a group assignment. It might be useful in this situation to create an ad hoc group of computers that keep the project files in sync. As soon as your group gets together, any work any one of you might have done will be synced with everyone. Any work done on an individual Mac during the group session will be synced in real-time, so everyone is on the same page at all times. Just to be safe, a manual sync could be initiated at the end. This would leave everyone is a good mood, brought about by the amazing graphics display.
These groups can all scale in size as far as the bandwidth for AirPort can handle. Beyond that limit, smarter sync scheduling would be needed, and that’s getting a bit ahead of myself. All of them are built off of the primary sync model: Mac-to-Mac. For the more complicated models, however, specific rules for each direction of the sync might be employed. For instance: the teacher’s copy of the calendar would never accept changed made by students.
I’d really like to see what other types of group sync the rest of you can think of. I feel that this sort of expanded use for Portal really takes it from “useful app” to “killer app”. Well, that, and the really cool sync animations. More on that later….
