Requirements Analysis and Design of an Electronic Mail System.

The use of electronic mail services is an important application area for modern office information systems in a distributed workstation environment. Based on the work habits of a 'naive' enduser, the article presents an analysis of application requirements for an electronic mailbox system to communicate in a distributed office environment. The services offered extend those of traditional - public or internal - mail systems, and integrate already existing components from text systems, databases, and communication systems. A proposal for the functional design of the end-user interface is presented in a simple syntactic form and graphically demonstrated using a well known network model. Here, main emphasis is on requirements and design of the end-user interface for a mailbox system in order to support evaluations of possible implementations in specific software systems.