Planning and Sizing Your Application

As you design your application for the Microsoft® BackOffice® environment, you must consider the BackOffice requirements for an application, and how yours will integrate with the other BackOffice components. If you do not design your application with regard to the physical constraints within BackOffice, the application can adversely affect the performance of other BackOffice components, applications, and ultimately itself. Because of the many possible interactions among components in the BackOffice family, and the complexity of those interactions, you should address several issues during the development phase. Important planning and sizing issues include:

• The number of users that will simultaneously access your application. The number of users your application can simultaneously support is related to the ability of your application to utilize timing, synchronization, and multithread-safe programming techniques, as well as to properly integrate efficient interprocess communication mechanisms.
• The amount of physical memory your application will require to operate effectively in the BackOffice environment. For example, memory usage is related to efficient heap and stack memory management within your application.
• The computer system on which your application will reside, which can directly impact your application's performance.

The following topics present the basic requirements for each of the BackOffice components, and address requirements for interactions among the components.