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Comment by msie | Hacker News Reader

I was trying to investigate what Concur was about and went to their website. They don't show any screenshots of the program (programs?). You have to give contact details to try out their program (so their sales team can contact you I guess). You have to give contact details to download any brochures about their products. Ugh.

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This is entirely unsurprising if you've spent time around enterprise software. I once worked in a very large, global (non-IT) company that was interested in software made by a very well-known, large, global IT company. We wanted to see a demo of their product. They pushed back saying "we don't need to do a demo, we're XYZ company you know we can do it. A demo isn't worth our time. If you want a demo, we will have to charge you $XX,000 of professional services". My employer at the time paid it.

we don't need to do a demo, we're XYZ company you know we can do it

I think this just made my day.

Your frustrations are because you are not their target customer. They really don't care for individuals trying out their software the first time. They certainly don't anticipate selling it to you without you talking to their sales team.

At its core, it's a handy suite for submitting expense reports. There's a nice mobile app that lets you capture receipts from your cell phone camera, and a team of (presumably offshore) auditors that will catch the most glaring errors on submissions. Generally, it's more pleasant than dealing with the typical AP department.

I haven't really played with the TripIt integration or other bells AMD whistles.

My employer uses Concur for expenses reports, and I had to use it once... My experience with it was terrible.

- UI - I could figure it out, but I bet many people will find it super confusing - Tickets were bought via mentioned TripIt, but they required me to find some kind of receipt to approve this expense, even so tickets were booked through them - Their support is very slow and very un-precise. And absence of support precision in such a horrible system is bad.

But I guess they are just like SAP. They don't have to demo it or make it better. They already got name and can just push garbage down throat of other large enterprises.

'Enterprise' software is not designed to be accessible.

I think in many cases 'Enterprise' software simply isn't designed at all - it just sort coalesces out of the darkness and the screams of thousands of tormented users.

I prefer to think it congeals...

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