If you haven’t heard about PortableApps yet, you’ve missed out on something cool. PortableApps focuses on modifying popular (mainly open source) softwares to run on USB flash-drives. The benefit of this is that you have all your bookmarks and settings right there, and you don’t have to install the softwares you need on each and every computer you use.

Among the products available, these might be used in business:

• Firefox Portable - Fast and secure web-browser
• FileZilla Portable - Full-featured FTP client
• Thunderbird Portable - A full-featured e-mail client
• OpenOffice.org Portable - Word processor, spreadsheet, presentations with Microsoft compatibility
• Sunbird Portable - Calendar and task management

I’m not seriously suggesting that everyone run around with a flash-drive with all their data, but rather use their home directory on the server as the installation target for these applications. I’d imagine that this would be very useful in an organization that do not use individual computers, but have many computers that are shared by the people in the organization. By doing so, everyone gets their set of individual applications with settings, cached e-mails and everything accessible without having to spend time configuring the applications for every computer.

Of course there are other approaches to solve this problem, such as roaming profiles with samba or a windows server, and locally installed softwares with profile support. I’m not suggesting that one solution is better than the other, because they both have their benefits and drawbacks.