Re^3: What is Enterprise Software?

[jdporter]

Really? That's your experience? Mine is about 180 degrees different. Admittedly, my situation was a pretty unusual one, working for a company that paid the $$$$$ for top-grade support from Rational. But we had Rational engineers (CC and CQ experts, respectively) on site two days a week and always on call. I learned a lot from them (as well as from the on-line resources) about how these products work, and I personally can't praise them enough. Yes, there's some complexity; yes, the products have some quirks and warts; yes, there's a substantial learning curve. In an enterprise environment, you should expect to, and shouldn't be afraid to, climb that curve. The payoff is a suite of powerful, "enterprise grade" tools you can exploit in taming your change management dragons. None of the open source tools I've encountered come close to the depth and breadth of power available in the Rational tools.

[Jenda]

Maybe they got better later. Or maybe your company paid more $ than mine.

As I said I did not have to use it often, I guess maybe three times or something, but it was enough. I don't know what does the current interface look like, but the version I have seen was simply ... interesting. Eg. the form for entering an issue resolution was insanely long so you kept on entering and selecting and checking and clicking and scrolling down until everything looked like it was there ... and then you have to scroll all the way up to find the Submit button. Beg your pardon? The forms were so long and complex that I got session timeout twice before I finished entering the data and submitted the form. Of course I lost all the stuff I entered.

Sure, part of the problem was that it's a complex tool for complex situations and big number of users and issues. Which to some extend has to cause the UI to be more complex than one of some simpler and less feature-full tool, but IMHO at least in that version they did a very bad job designing the UI.