4 ms·

I once worked at a large company (70K employees) in which the check request software (that is, if you needed to pay a vendor with a written check) was written i

I once worked at a large company (70K employees) in which the check request software (that is, if you needed to pay a vendor with a written check) was written in VBA embedded in Excel, using Outlook (the client, not Exchange) as Workflow. You opened the "spreadsheet", which hid Excel itself and showed a form. You filled it out, clicked Send and it used your local Outlook client to email a copy of itself to your boss, who then opened it and was presented with another form for approval, etc, up through finance and finally to the person who wrote the check. It was amazingly ugly and fragile, and of course, there was no way for anyone to see the state of the system (because the 'state' was distributed among the entire workforce's Exchange inboxes!). Want to know the status of your check request? No problem, simply call everyone who might have been in the approval chain and ask them to search their inboxes. Hope you find the most current person! (updated to correct the name of the software)

Declanomous 9y ago
God, I work in an environment like that. We are a non-profit, and our primary CRM is The Raiser's Edge. However, data is never manipulated within The Raiser's Edge. Instead every process involves exporting data from The Raiser's Edge, manipulating it with an MS Office application, and then re-importing it. When I started, almost every process was based around Access, using queries made using the query builder. With some basic scripting I managed to cut a couple of man-months of work down into about an hour or two of work a month. The entire thing is more fragile than a stack of cards though. At this point I could literally write a 200 page dissertation on all of the reasons why this is a bad idea. But it works, and it is cheap. So there you go.
Spooky23 9y ago
In the late 90s I worked for a company that ran their manufacturing logistics using Lotus Notes. An excel form / outlook workflow would have been an improvement.

Declanomous 9y ago

God, I work in an environment like that. We are a non-profit, and our primary CRM is The Raiser's Edge. However, data is never manipulated within The Raiser's Edge. Instead every process involves exporting data from The Raiser's Edge, manipulating it with an MS Office application, and then re-importing it. When I started, almost every process was based around Access, using queries made using the query builder. With some basic scripting I managed to cut a couple of man-months of work down into about an hour or two of work a month. The entire thing is more fragile than a stack of cards though. At this point I could literally write a 200 page dissertation on all of the reasons why this is a bad idea. But it works, and it is cheap. So there you go.

Spooky23 9y ago

In the late 90s I worked for a company that ran their manufacturing logistics using Lotus Notes. An excel form / outlook workflow would have been an improvement.