Fitch & Mather (F & M) is a fictional corporation that does business across a multistate area. It maintains a headquarters and home office on its original site, and has expanded its operations to several branch offices that extend its sales and distribution efforts. It is considered a medium-sized organization, employing 4,500 people.
As in most medium-sized and large organizations, F & M employees have jobs oriented toward sales and marketing; product development, testing, and documentation; product distribution; and post-sale customer support. In addition to its executives and administrative staff, the company is large enough to require a substantial infrastructure of people in support roles.
In terms of technical proficiency, the company's employees represent a cross-section of end users that might be found in any large enterprise not specifically engaged in the technology industry itself. Typically, they use productivity suites such as Microsoft® Office, mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook®, and Microsoft Internet Explorer as their Web browser. They do not install these applications themselves, but rely on the company's internal technical support staff to configure their computers.
Applications developed by the Information Technology (IT) group at F & M fall into two categories: internal applications and line-of-business applications. The first few issues of the BDG concentrate on rapidly building internal applications that can be quickly deployed and easily maintained. Later issues will likely turn to line-of-business applications such as those that track production, sales, and inventory. The BDG is an iterative document, and each installment will add more layers to the F & M story.
In any business, there are a number of services that support the enterprise without directly generating revenue. The applications highlighted in the BDG fall into this category. They are designed to fit seamlessly into the existing IT infrastructure, without incurring extravagant costs for development or deployment. Applications reach users through Internet Explorer, which downloads onto their computers all the application components they need. Using techniques and technologies demonstrated by F & M, firms should be able to concentrate limited IT resources on developing software components, and not on writing complicated low-level infrastructure code or supervising lengthy installations for each employee.
Depending on the requirements of an application, F & M assigns projects to both in-house developers and consultants. Developers working on F & M projects are proficient in the development tools available in the Microsoft Visual Studio® version 6.0 suite. (For information about Visual Studio, see the site http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio). They specialize in rapid application development (RAD) and follow the Windows® DNA programming framework. In addition to their development skills, they are also proficient with the Microsoft Windows operating systems, the members of the BackOffice® family of server applications, and Microsoft Component Object Model (COM) development.
The F & M developers also use the following Web sites on a regular basis: