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Comment by osullivj | Hacker News Reader

Wonderful story - thanks! I was at Chase Manhattan in London from 1997-2000, and remember the Lotus Notes system well. I had Win NT and Solaris desktop systems. There was an appalling timesheet system called Agresso, the most counterintuitive Windows GUI I ever encountered. I guess the lesson is that mgmt diktat in corp envs repeatedly inflicts crappy solutions on captive users. Plus ca change!

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No! It cannot be that Agresso was already around at that time. I still have to work with that horrific system, even though it is webbased now. It's still a horrible experience.

> There was an appalling timesheet system called Agresso, the most counterintuitive Windows GUI I ever encountered.

I love the idea that there was a terrible timesheet system called Agresso. And that it's still around today!

Some things do change with time. If this system was created today, I imagine it would be named something like quiesso or daisy.

Ted - Timesheet entry database

Actually I used to work for the company that makes it. It changed names some years ago and is now called "Unit4 Business World"

Small world

Agresso was my first job. I got to migrate customers off of Ingres, Sybase, Informix to either Oracle or SQL Server 6.5. After some time, I got the opportunity to build their Crystal Reports integration. This was 1997-1998.

Do you happen to know whether the back-end systems would still be the systems that you used to work on? I have a feeling it never really changed...

Sorry, I have no insight in that. When I was there we were just upgrading to Agresso 5, and as I remember it, it was pretty much a win32 app talking directly to the database. Not sure how much, if any, server part was there in between. So it has probably changed when they switched to web.

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