Ask HN: Who is on your shit-list of frustrating Enterprise Software? | Hacker News Reader

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

21 pointstim_nuwin34 comments

Would you pay for alternatives if they addressed your pain points?

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.

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.

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.

Is there anything that actually comes close to doing this and doesn't fall into the problem of "...turns into an exercise of shoehorning your data into a system that just can't accommodate it."? Sadly, from what I have seen Salesforce is probably still the best solution beyond building your own apps.

Yeah, Salesforce might just be the best of these types of systems. But even then, it is the best-dressed clown at the circus. Unless you have a really simple business model, you should probably just build a custom app.

What business are you running, and how big is your current team? Just curious, as I've heard that Salesforce is probably overkill for most small businesses/startups.

Mid-sized telecom company. SF is too simplistic for our complex pricing needs.

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

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,

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.

Ah cool, thanks for the writeup.

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.

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.

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.

I input raw logs to Splunk and built great looking dashboards with full access to raw data.

GA is a free joke.

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

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.

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>

Lotus Notes.

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.

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

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

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

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).

Oracle! for not showing prices

many many others

Symantec, not a fan of their backup software.

SALESFORCE

Care to elaborate?

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

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?

ADP eTime

Maconomy.

What in particular don't you like about Maconomy?

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

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