Breaking Par was approached with a unique idea. A company wanted to set up a "garage sale" web site where their employees could post items they wish to sell and other employees could browse and purchase those items.

The flow of the application was pretty simple. An employee would post an item to be sold. The information posted was the name of the item, the asking price, a description, and optionally a picture. Although the name of the person who posted the item would be stored, it would not be displayed on the intranet.

Employees could then browse the items in the garage sale. When they found something they wished to purchase, they would put that item into their "shopping cart". Since this was an intranet site, there was no need to do anything like accepting credit cards or checks on-line. Instead, "purchasing" meant sending an email to the person who posted the product and marking the product as "sale pending".

Once the sale was complete, the employee who posted the product would remove it from the application.

Because the company was already using Lotus Domino for some intranet sites, it made sense to use Domino for this application. Security was necessary so only someone who posted a product could remove that product. And nobody could put a product into their shopping cart anonymously - this is so the email at the time of purchase would be sent from the right person.