What is PostMaster?
Here’s another problem on which to practice your object-oriented analysis: You have
been hired by Defective Software to start a new software project and to hire a team of
C++ programmers to implement your program. Sam Snett, vice-president of New
Product Development, is your new boss. He wants you to design and build PostMaster,
a utility to read electronic mail from various unrelated email providers. The potential
customer is a business person who uses more than one email product (for example,
Gmail, Hotmail, and Lotus Notes).
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| What is PostMaster |
The customer will be able to teach PostMaster how to connect to each of the email
providers. PostMaster will get the mail and then present it in a uniform manner,
enabling the customer to organize the mail, reply, forward letters among services,
and so forth.
PostMaster Professional, to be developed as version two of PostMaster, is already
anticipated. It will add an administrative assistant mode that will enable the user to
designate another person to read some or all of the mail, to handle routine corre-
spondence, and so forth. There is also speculation in the marketing department that
an artificial-intelligence component might add the capability for PostMaster to pre-
sort and prioritize the mail based on subject and content keywords and associations.
Other enhancements have been talked about, including the capability to handle not
only mail but discussion groups, such as Internet newsgroups and mail lists. It is
obvious that Acme has great hopes for PostMaster, and you are under severe time
constraints to bring it to market, although you seem to have a nearly unlimited
budget.
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