[Mono-list] A 'use case'

[Imaginarie]

Here is a hypothetical situation that I thought up whilst trying to get a 
mental image of where Mono and .GNU (maybe portable.net too) might be 
used in the future.

My imaginary company produces brochures and catalogues. In order to take 
advantage of some government scheme, we have a large number of 
stay-at-home mums in employment who do their work at home on a 
company-supplied computer, and communicate their work via the internet. 
For economic reasons we are using Linux 3.0 on Gnome 2.2 (including 
Evolution 0.436-pre27 beta 4)

All the documents, both the source text given to us by companies and the 
documents we produce, are stored on a SAN and a Linux server at the head 
office. The employees work on these documents live via the internet, in 
particular two or more off-site employees can be working on the same 
document simultaneously, say a couple editing text, whilst one does 
layout and formatting and another does graphics.

Now think about the following points, and consider which technologies 
(Mono, .gnu, bonobo, portable.net, etc.) have responsibility, and where 
the technologies need to communicate amongst themselves.

* How do the workers authenticate?
* How is the communication over the internet encrypted?
* How will the software on the user's machine be kept up to date?
* How is responsibility balanced between the user's machine and the 
server?
* Where is the split in responsibility between mono and bonobo on the 
client?
* How will the technologies manage the 'simultaneous editing' scenario?
* How can the workers keep going when the network goes down?
* Can you think of anything else?

I thought that this particular situation could be a good model for both 
how these technologies could be utilised and what future working 
practices might be. 

Dave