Trey Research: Taking Full Advantage of the Microsoft Exchange Server Programmable Interface

Trey Research is a diversified global financial investment company whose organizations provide personal banking, investment counseling and sales, and financial market and economic analysis for internal and external customers. Like Fabrikam, Inc., this company has chosen to standardize its messaging system on Microsoft Exchange Server for a variety of reasons. Key to its decision is the native X.400 and Internet connectivity in Microsoft Exchange Server. This capability is not only an internal standard, it enables the company to share information with its many international customers and information suppliers.

Another key advantage of Microsoft Exchange Server is its ability to build custom applications that integrate the company's desktop application suite with Microsoft Exchange Server. Management at Trey Research plans to take advantage of the built-in customization ability of Microsoft Exchange Server to provide users with quick access to the information they need and the ability to use their desktop tools to analyze and format the information.

These capabilities are to be provided through customized applications, which enable users to use Microsoft Exchange Server public folders as repositories for status reports or news feeds that are downloaded and then output that data to Microsoft Office applications for spreadsheet analysis, graphing, and charting. After data analysis has been completed, new statistical information is to be placed in a Microsoft Exchange Server public folder that is accessible only to executives for review and comment. By using the replication facility in Microsoft Exchange Server as a distributed information transport and using Internet Mail Service to connect Microsoft Exchange Server sites, Trey Research will ensure that important information is distributed automatically to its offices worldwide.

Trey Research also plans to use Schedule+ for project scheduling by linking data maintained in public folders, Microsoft Project, and Schedule+. Microsoft Exchange Server can also enable the company to take advantage of its investment in Visual Basic training for its corporate developers.

In short, Trey Research plans to take advantage of the same capabilities that Fabrikam, Inc. found useful, including the following additional application design benefits of Microsoft Exchange Server:

• Scalable tools for application design ¾ Many of the solutions Trey Research evaluated as possible workgroup and e-mail infrastructures could only support a limited amount of functionality, or they required highly skilled and expensive development resources to implement. Now Trey Research has the tools they need to build applications quickly and enable their internal development staff to customize applications without worrying about exceeding the functionality available through the tools.
• Native support for Internet standards ¾ Trey Research can develop applications that gather relevant information from the Internet and distribute it to its other Microsoft Exchange Server sites worldwide over an Internet backbone.
• Integration with the Microsoft Office applications suite ¾ Trey Research wants to make the most of its investment in Microsoft Office by integrating its groupware and e-mail with desktop applications and by adopting a common programmable interface for the two. As a result, users can work with a familiar interface, even with custom applications. In addition, the company's development staff have a common tool set and programming interface available in Microsoft Office applications¾Visual Basic and the scripting language of Visual Basic for Applications¾to integrate desktop applications into workgroup solutions.