If an application created by an end user becomes popular and can be rolled out to the rest of the company, Trey Research wants its more experienced development teams to be able to further customize the application. This means that the company needs a solution that can meet the dual¾and often conflicting¾goals of enabling users to design applications and forms and enabling the development staff to make these applications more robust, to integrate them with existing applications, and to add additional functionality. Microsoft Exchange Server was the only workgroup and messaging product evaluated by Trey Research that could provide a scalable application design environment.
After an application is rolled out, users inevitably find ways to improve it, and the competitive environment might require additional customization. Because forms can be customized with Visual Basic, the desired functionality can be added to Microsoft Exchange Server workgroup solutions that use forms. Because Visual Basic is a powerful programming language capable of calling any Windows-based API, there is virtually no limit to the functionality that can be added.