Managing Communication with Members
The first of the remaining requirements is that our application has to manage communication with members. It has to automatically send offer e-mails or letters to members when the item they have reserved becomes available. Also the system has to be able to register all other forms of the communication with members – phone calls, discussions, faxes etc (see Requirements).
We start as usual by defining additional business objects and rules. The business objects that we identify are as follows:
OutgoingLetterOutgoingEmailContactNote
The meaning of the first two objects is obvious. The third object aims to capture other forms of communication with members, such as received letters, phone calls, faxes, discussion etc. E-mails received from members deserve a separate discussion. Aware IM is capable of receiving and registering e-mails automatically (and our application will include this feature). Whether this feature will be enabled, though, in the final system depends on the administrator of a particular library. If, for whatever reason, the feature will be disabled, then the system will still allow users to register incoming e-mails manually – through the use of the ContactNote object.