After having used Sharepoint I can completely understand why people hate it. But I am a little surprised by Salesforce (and Wordpress too).
Can anyone explain why it is so bad?
Can anyone explain why it is so bad?
It's like a webapp from the 90s, every action triggers a complete page reload; complete with an occasionally buggy UI, limited searchability, restrictive UI, and occasionally misrouted tickets that were impossible to find. But mostly, it was just really slow.
I've talked to a few other folks who had similar experiences at other companies. In every case, I got the impression that using Salesforce was a mandate made by management without consulting the folks who'd actually have to use it every day.
Maybe it's a bit better on the CRM side, or if your company pays the extra money for Desk.com... but I really wouldn't recommend using Salesforce for handling support tickets.
How is that any different from other programming interfaces?
Do you also not like dynamic typing because it gives you more flexibility?
I don't like dynamic typing for other, myriad reasons :)
So does Apple, but probably for their Watch integration or improving internal CRM.
All major tech consulting firms are employing SF as a backend. It is perceived as an extremely secure product.
Disclaimer: I work there
The documentation is dense and somewhat difficult to follow - I ended up spending a lot of time reading forum posts to get a grip on how to use it. The API at the time was also SOAP/XML, with all the fun joy that comes with using that (although, in fairness, it looks like they now have a REST/JSON API too).
The API limits are also draconian, resulting in all kinds of code nastiness to stay within the usage limits. In our case, because of how things are stored in Salesforce and how the API is constructed, it might take 5+ API calls to update various parts of a single Account. We ended up batching changes and sending them every hour or so, and just had to tell our sales folks that info in Salesforce may be delayed up to an hour.
Not to mention, from a UX perspective, it feels like the 00s never ended.
We later ended up switching to Zurmo with a very heavy amount of customization. It ended up making more business sense to bring it in house and pay someone to customize it for exactly what we needed than to sign another Salesforce contract.
The average wordpress theme will have over 10,000 lines of html, php, javascript, css in it.
Wordpress itself has continued to massively expand for no apparent reason. 10,000 lines of code in 2003; 20,000 in 2004; 30,000 in 2005; 40,000 in 2006; 60,000 in 2007; 90,000 in 2008; 120,000 in 2009; 140,000 in 2010; 150,000 in 2011; 160,000 in 2012; 230,000 in 2013; 300,000 in 2014.
It's like the Spruce Goose of cms. Yeah it'll fly, but it's ridiculous.
These are basics you'd expect any CRM software to handle well, but it's also surprisingly bad at things you'd expect a darling of the enterprise world to do well at (representation of structure of corporate groups, representation of client decision making hierarchies, representation of individuals' roles at multiple clients, ability to find companies by geography etc.) And needless to say, the corporate versions that have been hacked to fit specific needs add all manner of monstrous new forms to fill in and weird bugs with price calculation.
If there's one thing that sums the service up it's this: if you're locked out of Salesforce[1] the screen which advises you of this provides an email address for their help team... which turns out to be autoresponder advising you that the mailbox is not being monitored so please log into Salesforce to lodge the response.
Salesforce would fit to Microsoft's product portfolio. They have Microsoft Dynamics CRM but Salesforce offers more features. Then the have Microsoft Dynamics ERP which consists of 5 different ERP products that Microsoft bought: Microsoft Dynamics AX (formerly Axapta), Microsoft Dynamics GP (formerly Great Plains Software), Microsoft Dynamics NAV (formerly Navision), Microsoft Dynamics SL (formerly Solomon IV), Microsoft Dynamics C5 (formerly Concorde C5). Salesforce would theoretically be renamed to Dynamics CRM SF.