One goal of the BackOffice Developer's Guide (BDG) is to explain how to use the right BackOffice technology for the purpose, environment, and scale of your application. Here is a very brief example of the sort of decision-making that the BDG will cover in great detail as it describes each scenario:
The Fitch & Mather development team had a choice to make when it came to implementing the automatic notification of overdue materials. They decided to use the SQL Executive to invoke a stored procedure that retrieves user names and passes them to the SQL Server xp_sendmail stored procedure. They declined to use Collaboration Data Objects (CDO) because for certain purposes, using a technology such as CDO makes development needlessly complicated. CDO is a scripting interface to the Messaging Applications Programming Interface (MAPI) programming model. Since SQL Mail makes MAPI calls directly, this choice cuts out an abstraction layer and makes for a simpler application with fewer opportunities for error. Also, the mail is triggered by events in the database; had the application design called for mail to be sent by the user from the Internet Explorer-hosted user interface, the ASP pages would have made the appropriate calls to CDO, which would in turn call MAPI.