You might have seen a little bit about session management when you read about GNOME. Session management can be a very useful tool for you in your use of GNOME and GNOME applications.
The main idea of session management is that your work will be saved whenever you log out of GNOME. Your GNOME "Session" is currently saved when you log out, however you may not notice all that it can do.
Probably one of the most useful features of session management is the ability to start applications you had open when you logged out of GNOME. This is easily demonstrated as you exit GNOME and enter again. You will see your applications re-appear in the same location on your desktop as they were when you logged out.
If there are certain applications you wish to start up whenever you log in, even if they were not open the last time your session was saved, you may add them to the Session Manager Capplet which you can read about in the section called Session Manager in Chapter 17.
IMPORTANT: If you have heard about application data being session managed you have heard about the future of GNOME. For application data to be saved correctly you must be using a fully compliant GNOME application. At the time of publication of this manual there were not any applications that offer full session management for your data, so until there are some and you are aware of their capabilities you should not rely on session management to save your application data.