Fabrikam, Inc. is a multinational company with branch sites throughout the world. It has been running a host-based system as its primary internal e-mail system, although some branches have implemented local area network (LAN)-based e-mail in response to user requests.
A re-engineering effort has made it apparent to upper management that to reduce administrative, support, training, and custom-development costs, the company eventually needs to standardize on a single e-mail system. E-mail is considered mission-critical because it is relied on heavily by internal users to transfer information.
In addition, users of the company's LAN-based messaging systems frequently send rich-text objects, such as documents and spreadsheets, and they are frustrated with the current messaging environment because it does not enable them to share that information with other branches of the company. Although users have many good ideas for automating processes by using the messaging infrastructure, the Information Services department often lacks the ability to implement them because of the heterogeneous messaging environments, the difficulty in programming applications on their existing messaging system, and a lack of resources.