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Here are some examples of practical applications. All names are fictitious. Some problems are small, others are a lot more interesting...

• Jenny does not like to wear a watch and frequently works out of sight of a clock. Occasionally she needs to know the time. She does carry a digital phone, so she has a speed dial button that phones her PBX that repeats back the current time. She also has a list of over two hundred frequently called numbers, but her phone can only store 50 speed dial numbers. So her PBX is set up to provide prompts to speed the dialling process, and she does not have to remember those less-frequently called numbers.
• Jenny also needs reminders, rather like a wake up call, which remind her when the turkey needs basting, the bread needs to be extracted from the machine, the two-hour settling period is finished for a mixing operation, or she needs to call a contact about rental of equipment at a specific time. She instructs her PBX system to call her with a reminder, so she is free to devote full attention to her work in the garden knowing that someone else is watching time elapse. There is no limit, apart from practical considerations, to the number of reminders she can set up at the beginning of the day.
• Bill needs to have a database of all the calls made to and from his business. He needs to know when the call starts, ends, which extension handled the call, where the call was initiated. He also needs the system to be able to respond correctly if calls come in while the office is closed.
• Barry has decided to implement a discount system at the checkout in his garden centre. It is a complex system and requires that records be kept of transactions. A plain cash register does not provide the necessary flexibility, so he decided to use a computer-based point of sale system. He now has a solid database going back many years of transactions for his customers.
• XYZ Company sells plants at retail. They buy stock from a wholesaler who has his own preferences for latin names of the stock they supply. XYZ also has their preferred names. Neither of the two sources are the accepted botanical name, but occasionally XYZ needs to communicate with a third party who insists that references to plant names be to the standard accepted name. XYZ therefore keeps a database of various names, all of which are right, but right in different contexts, which are linked to a standard reference.
• Jack runs a landscaping operation. He has decided he needs to give his office employees email addresses since they need to be in frequent contact with the media, university research departments, suppliers and each other. Jack has decided that he needs to have his own domain name so that this increases the confidence of the correspondents that they are talking to the right person in the right organization. At the same time Jack requires a backup mechanism so that if an email is received and then deleted accidentally it can be restored, and he also needs to ensure that his email server is not being abused by messaging that is not related to his business. So each email received by his employees is automatically copied to a special archive account.
• Mary has a number of fine photos of plants on her website. She discovered that someone was hotlinking to her photos, consuming her bandwidth. She knew the IP address of the person stealing her resources and wanted to ensure that this person was denied access, but that the picture would remain available to her own web pages.
• Allan found that he was spending a long time on the phone taking orders for plants. He wanted a method that would allow customers to select their product from a list on an internet web page. The list would need to show prices, the container size, the stage of development of the plant, and how many of that plant he had in stock. The system would have to warn the customer if they tried to order more than were actually in stock. In addition, Allan has a discount price structure for different customers. Prices could only be shown once the customer had identified themselves to the system.
• As part of his IPM strategy, Carl needed to record the incidence of pests on the plants in his greenhouses. He needed to be able to review his observations over time, and view the corrective measures taken at the time.
• Elmo was concerned that his customers were ordering the same types of plants on a frequent basis, and missing out on a lot of good quality plant materials that would sell well if only they could be exposed to the buying public. He needed a good summary of what the customer ordered regularly, and what they had not ever ordered, so that a marketing strategy could be developed.
• Elizabeth wanted to divide her web domain into two sections. The requirements of her wholesale and retail divisions were so different, and customers were frequently mistaking the one division for the other on the website. She decided that she needed a way of presenting and collecting information that was totally different in the two areas. She was able to set up two subdomains, each with its own cascading style sheet control of displayed information. Confusion and mistakes were dramatically reduced.
• Ed was disturbed that occasionally his customers would phone and say that they could not access his website. Ed would log on and find that indeed there was a problem with the server. This always seemed to happen at the busiest time of the production and sales season, exactly the time that he did not have to deal with the situation.
• Grant has 10 satellite greenhouse retail outlets, each of which has from three to six people on manning the operation depending on the day of the week, week of the year, holidays etc. Each of the locations requires a slightly different set of skills, and each of the employees brings a different skill set and may or may not be available to work. In addition there can be sudden changes to their availability. Grant needed a process that would minimize the time spent on scheduling staff, and produce a result that staff could consult online to discover their working location and schedule without phoning in and disturbing office staff.