From the design perspective, a business object defines a "thing" that end-users use in their day-to-day activities. For example:

• Users dealing with an order processing application would use the words Orders, Customers, and Products.
• In working with e-mail, people talk about Inboxes, OutBoxes, and Messages.
• A Human Resources application would use Employees and Timesheets.
• In many applications, users talk about the Daily Reports or the Monthly Reports – these can be business objects.
• A banking application would use Banks, Branches, Transactions, Customers, and Accounts.

From the implementation perspective, a business object exists within an application and defines the lowest level of end-user navigation control.

VLF-ONE

For example, in VLF-ONE, business objects are used for navigation like this:

VLF-WIN

In VLF-WIN, they are used like this:

Note that both VLF-ONE and VLF-WIN can visualize end-user navigations in ways other than those shown here.