Content Management

You usually don't think in terms of content management from a personal perspective. In fact, neither do most businesses offering content products in the world today. Most content management products are directed at corporations that must maintain and manage informational assets on a large scale.

However, personal information such as photos, music, investments, payments, and so on, comprises some of the most important content in your life. To date, this type of personal information is rarely organized to the level that you organize your business assets.

As new devices emerge that provide informational mobility, new opportunities will exist to capture information and store it in a personal repository.

How many devices must you "sync" before the benefits of mobile information capturing are outweighed by the manual maintenance effort?

Thinking in terms of a personal portal like the one illustrated in Figure 18.1 will help you envision the home server in which automation truly offers a great computing opportunity.

Figure 18.1. The Personal Portal will evolve into a central nervous system for your personal content. Event notification will become increasingly important as personal devices integrate with home automation.

Personal Portal Requirements

Your personal portal will go far beyond showing images of your last vacation or the birth of your new child. This is not to say these are not important events, but merely to highlight that it is only the beginning!

The requirements for home portals of the future include the following:

• A gateway to the Internet This is a bidirectional gateway that allows communication with home portal systems.

• Event notification The system must act as an alarm for personal events.

• Support for many different data formats Data will be received and transmitted in the form that makes sense for the medium; for example, text, image, sound, video.

• Support for many different application types It must interface to applications that reside on traditional workgroup hardware, in addition to devices and mobile appliances.

• Support many different sources of information Sources of information will be as varied as the content received.

• Support many different device types Appliances both internal and external to the home will have access through wired and wireless technology.

• Provide information-sharing capabilities Controlled sharing of information and group collaboration will be required.

• Provide remote access to information Services and content must be accessed from any location.

• Minimize support and maintenance requirements The home portal must minimize maintenance requirements to become an effective and omnipresent application entity.

• Provide flexibility in information organization The system must be highly configurable and adaptable to change.

This is just a start to the requirements for the personal portal of the future. As we realize the potential in the connected world, new requirements will continue to surface.