Lesson 10: Choosing a BackOffice Solution

Selecting a Microsoft BackOffice Product

In this exercise, business various problem scenarios will be presented. Select a Microsoft BackOffice product that will help solve the problem, and describe why the product would be the best solution.

1. Your company has four divisions. Each division wishes to manage its own Web content that will be available to the public through the company's Internet connection. It is expected that the site will receive many visitors each day. In addition, upper management wishes to run complex reports based on the activities of the Web site in order to cost justify using this new marketing technique. Assuming the company does not currently have any servers available for your use, which BackOffice products would be required to implement this solution?
2. Upper management wishes to support the company's large travelling sales staff. All are equipped with laptop computers and 28.8K modems. What Microsoft BackOffice product can allow the field to access their e-mail folders over the Web?
3. A Visual Basic application that you have created must be able to retrieve data from an AS/400. What Microsoft BackOffice product can be used to facilitate connecting to midrange or mainframe computers?
4. Upper management has decided to provide all desktop users access to the Internet. However, the users currently only have the IPX network protocol installed. What Microsoft BackOffice product can be used to allow the users access to the Internet without needing to configure an IP address for each user ?
5. Which feature of Microsoft SQL Server allows business logic to be compiled and saved in a central database?
6. Upper management has decided that onsite tech support at many of the company's remote locations is too expensive. In addition, there is not an accurate view of the various hardware configurations currently in use. What Microsoft BackOffice product can help support the user-base and create an inventory of hardware?
7. As you near completion of a new business application, your manager asks for a solution to distribute the product to the nearly 1,000 users in the company, many of whom are located throughout the country at remote sites. What would you recommend?
8. How can Microsoft Site Server, Enterprise Edition help your company publish a new online catalog complete with online order fulfillment?

   Answers

Lesson Summary

BackOffice is a complete and extensible development platform for building business solutions for the intranet and for the Internet. It supports the full spectrum of data storage including a secure file system for files and web pages, a messaging store, and a relational database for structured data. It provides a unified security model, common administrative tools, systems management, replication, host integration, and information query for the Internet.