

Ask HN: Who is on your shit-list of frustrating Enterprise Software? - tim_nuwin

Would you pay for alternatives if they addressed your pain points?
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wpaprocki
Salesforce. It's not a bad system for what it was designed to do--sales and
marketing. The problem is that it is over-promoted and over-sold as a
versatile platform that can do anything. When you actually try to model
complex business logic, however, you're screwed. Unless your business model
conforms closely to their pre-built model, Salesforce development turns into
an exercise of shoehorning your data into a system that just can't accommodate
it.

If you need to model data with a lot of junction objects, good luck getting
reports. You can only report on up to 4 objects at a time. Let's hope that you
don't need any serious data aggregation since matrix reports limit you to 2x2
fields. You want to store data in JSON format and access it through a NoSQL
database? You've got to build it outside of the system and have it talk to
that database through custom code. But I thought Salesforce could do anything!

And on top of all of those obstacles, you get the privilege of paying a high
monthly fee for a system that you'll probably only be able to get working if
you shell out yet more license fees for 3rd party apps that hopefully fill in
the gaps. But at least they just released a new analytics system that
overcomes some of the absurd limitation on reporting that are inherent in the
system--but of course it will cost you.

That being said, the alternatives better be good if I'm going to pay for them.
Postgresql enterprise is probably worth it, given how awesome the free version
is. And even then, I would just build a Django or Rails app on top of it, so
even if I have to customize it, I won't be paying for the very fancy shackles
that Salesforce gives me.

~~~
colinloretz
That's the biggest issue with their growth right now. Salesforce has done a
great job in marketing that it can "do anything"... provided you can build it
yourself and get around all the developer platform limitations. I used to do
Salesforce consulting and custom development, won their hackathon in 2009,
worked with many companies on internal tools and apps and am so happy to be
out of that game now.

~~~
sg_gabriel
Who were your typical Salesforce consulting and custom development clients? I
may be wrong, but I would think that if you have enough money to spend on
customisation for an app that doesn't even belong to you, it may be cheaper
and more efficient in the long run to commission a custom built solution.

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patrickgokey
Office 365 Enterprise, especially OneDrive for Business. I feel like an
unwilling beta tester.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
I don't work for Office 365 or have affiliation there nor would I suggest
Office deploys in a way that is AGILE.

My question for you as a founder is, how else would you prefer that a product
introduce new features? I want to make sure that our users don't feel like you
do, but I also need to roll out new functions as we grow so there has to be a
balance there,

~~~
patrickgokey
I was originally hired at my current company to migrate our on-premise servers
to Office 365, so I was not involved in the decision to actually select a
service.

Microsoft had already considered OneDrive for Business (SkyDrive Pro at the
time) a finished product. Two years of hell has proven otherwise. Personally I
still view OneDrive as an MVP, though I will concede it has gotten a little
better over time.

Microsoft has also failed to provide notification of a new feature rolling out
several times, causing confusion with end-users. At best, I'll get a brief
message in the Office 365 admin portal that says "Within the next 4 months,
we'll be rolling out x, y, and z features." I'm glad that I know months in
advance of a new feature, but not knowing any type of specific time frame
really puts us at a disadvantage.

New features are awesome and I am more than willing to try them out if I know
they're still not totally ready. Ultimately what really irritates me is when
companies tout a product as "enterprise-ready" that is still riddled with
bugs.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Ah cool, thanks for the writeup.

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porker
Microsoft Dynamics CRM. I had the 'privilege' of working with the cloud
version when it was new, interfacing their extensive LAMP-stack with it via
SOAP. Leaving aside the SOAP integration issues (which were more extensive
than any other PHP-to-.NET integration I've done) the product would only work
in Internet Explorer, the interface was hideously rubbish, and no one in the
company seemed able to productively use it.

Give me Salesforce any day - at least users can use it. As to why the company
had gone with Microsoft CRM? Because the piece of software they wanted to use
to manage their business would only integrate with it.

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kyllo
IBM DB2. Bloated, clunky admin interface, outdated feature set, buggy JDBC
drivers, no drivers available for many languages, unhelpful error messages.
Would kill to have PostgreSQL at work instead.

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ZenoArrow
IBM Coremetrics. If your company is considering using it, run to the hills!
Sure, it might offer greater accuracy than Google Analytics, and there's good
live chat support, but even the simplest of reporting tasks can end up being
hugely frustrating. I liken it to trying to run a kitchen when you only have
access to the serving hatch.

If you're looking to develop an alternative, recognise that analytics tools
should give you easy access to the raw data. I wouldn't want anything less.

~~~
taf2
How is it more accurate? Are they not using javascript? Do they do less
sampling for larger properties?

~~~
ZenoArrow
To give an example, with CM you can choose to build ad hoc reports with either
a full data set or a sampled data set. GA will sample data and give you an
accuracy rating, but inaccuracies can grow from this depending on how you use
the reports (e.g. comparing multiple metrics over a long time period). I have
no idea if the premium version of GA gives you access to full data sets but
that's even more expensive than CM.

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anmonteiro90
IBM BPM (Business Process Manager): sold as a versatile enterprise system that
can model even the most complex business processes in an easy way, it ships
full of bugs that one cannot address or work around. The actual most
significant pain point is the inability to express abstractions that would
facilitate the coding process, leading one to actually have to repeat code
from time to time.

</rant>

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bitwize
Lotus Notes.

~~~
century19
Agree with this.

\- Crashes \- Copy and paste is terrible \- Pasting from Excel etc ends up as
an embedded picture so the receivers can't use it \- Soo slow to search for
anything \- mailbox always full \- no webmail access for me

We were forced to migrate to Lotus Notes a few years ago after a merger and
one of our regional offices refused to. They were right.

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brooklyndavs
Most software that address management of identities in a enterprise is bad.
The "solutions" sold by CA, Oracle, and Dell are particularly terrible.

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RamseyMcGrath
Oh man, Atlassian Products without a doubt. JIRA and Confluence are nightmares
to maintain with an enterprise amount of users.

~~~
tim_nuwin
YES, the worst is making custom tweaks. What pain-points have you experienced
with them?

~~~
RamseyMcGrath
I've had a bunch, especially with JIRA. -Theres no way to cluster servers or
have a failover machine -Want to upgrade? Better hope your plugins will
upgrade too or you'll lose data or complete issues -Want to import a JIRA
project from an older version of the app? Get set to spin up VMs. -Want to
upgrade JIRA? Take the server down and reinstall it -Want to enable some type
of logging? Take the server down and edit the shell script they start the
application with (same with increasing JVM heap size).

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sogen
Oracle! for not showing prices

many many others

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boredinballard
Symantec, not a fan of their backup software.

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jpd750
SALESFORCE

~~~
sg_gabriel
Care to elaborate?

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monsterix
Has any tried using SAP for something as simple as issuing a PO amendment?
#crap2thecore

~~~
ZenoArrow
I've not used 'big SAP', but I've used SAP B1 to amend purchase orders. I find
SAP quite flexible, the challenge can come from finding the best way to do
something. What pain points did you encounter when amending the PO?

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tmgreen
ADP eTime

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Terr_
Maconomy.

~~~
tim_nuwin
What in particular don't you like about Maconomy?

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shitgoose
"Enterprise Software" is euphemism for "Shit Software".

