• adhocfungus@midwest.social
    141·
    10 days ago

    Against every developer’s advice, management has moved our entire stack to Microsoft Dynamics 365. It took over a year of prep, millions in ISV consulting charges, and it performs like trash. Now management is constantly complaining about outages, Microsoft nickles and dimes us for tens of thousands more than the estimates, and they are constantly jerking us around to half-baked tech by removing support for anything that actually works. “Want data out of F&O? We’re killing everything except Synapse Link. You spent months migrating yet it drops data? That’s not surprising since we fired everyone working on it. You should be on Fabric! No, that’s not finished either, but we need to test it on someone!”

    I’m very bitter.

    • sasquash@sopuli.xyz
      37·
      10 days ago

      My company is making exactly the same mistake right now. I simply can’t understand how a European company can still make itself so dependent on Microsoft at this point. We Devs have raised the issue to our bosses, but there are still a lot of old MS fanboys around. Some people have to learn it the hard way.

      • DeviantOvary@lemmy.world
        13·
        10 days ago

        I’ll tell you how. My company has been moving to solutions developed and/or hosted in EU for privacy reasons, but at the same time continue to go deeper and deeper into M$ ecosystem because the management believes XYZ product sounds cool and/or works better than the alternatives we’re using. I’m just waiting for this circus to fall apart.

      • ssfckdt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        10·
        9 days ago

        When we finally onboarded the D365 ERP replacement, management wanted to run perf testing on it told them we could do it in JMeter, and we already had JMeter code that we’d used for the older systems, and we’d learned more than enough from including it in integration automation, that I was sure we could do it.

        Instead they hired two chodes from an agency and told them to use some odd tool. Literally a month into that project one of the contractors asked me straight up why we weren’t just using JMeter.

        They eventually cut those guys because they weren’t able to produce, and then went with some kookball Akamai solution (Cloudtest?) They didn’t even seem to realize that by going with that solution, they were going to be beholden to paying Akamai every time they wanted to run it. They somehow managed to cajole Akamai into giving us a standalone version of the tool, but they didn’t seem to comprehend that when you run it that way you don’t get the cloud.

        It’s funny, someone asked me the other day why I quit that job, and I’m now suddenly starting to remember why.

        It was actually a pretty good company, it just wasn’t a software company, so its tech decisions were often really bonkers. But that aside, it was actually a good company, and part of me kicks myself for leaving it – I’d probably still be working there four years later.

        I might have needed a lot of therapy in the meantime, though

      • adhocfungus@midwest.social
        20·
        9 days ago

        I wish! It’s more of a loose collection of random business softwares in various states of abandonment. D365 CE is a platform for Sales teams to organize and track leads, quotes, contracts, etc. D365 BC is an ERP platform born out of the ashes of NAV, the core of which Microsoft bought decades ago. D365 F&O, D365 S&M, and others are various flavors of AX, another ERP platform Microsoft bought over a decade ago. They are direct competitors to D365 BC for some reason. None of these softwares can communicate directly with each other, and none allow direct access to the Azure SQL. Occasionally Microsoft will throw a bone towards integration stuff like DualWrite or Synapse or Fabric, but they can never seem to commit and eventually abandon those too.

        I would actually be much happier if it was just crummy databases instead of an archipelago of rotting digital islands.

        • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7·
          9 days ago

          D365 CE is a platform for Sales teams to organize and track leads, quotes, contracts, etc.

          Huh, I would have thought “CE” stood for “compact edition” like it did for Windows CE back in the day. Which was unironically called “WinCE” by Microsoft.

      • ssfckdt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        6·
        9 days ago

        Frankly it’s a bit like HyperCard.

        One of the things we learned early on in trying to integrate a D365 system into our UI integration test automation, was that when you changed pages, the previous page was actually still in the DOM and so if you didn’t update your locators to the new “context” or screen, you’d be trying to interact with things from two screens ago. I dunno honestly what they would have done without someone like me who could actually RE that. The guy that had seniority over me was completely lost.

        • noughtnaut@lemmy.world
          1·
          8 days ago

          HyperCard! There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. It was marvellous, for its time.

          I’m appalled to see it compared to some shitty MS product (that I have no knowledge of), and I’ll just add that I have never encountered our hard of this bonkers “previous page is still active” issue in HyperCard - but I readily believe it’s there in 365.

    • morbidcactus@lemmy.ca
      6·
      10 days ago

      Synapse link is a pain too if you’re doing everything with as much private networking as possible. Actual setup is quick, but you need a windows machine for the PowerShell libraries needed for the dynamics side of the link, and if you’re just added as a guest to a client tenant, the cmdlets won’t let you login on their tenant, always uses the default tenant as far as I recall and there’s no tenant flag. I’ve set it up a handful of times and once it’s up it works really well, just an annoyance sometimes getting there. Think doing it through event hub has some similar irritations too.

      I’ve not had the pain of dealing with fabric extensively, most of the engineers and data scientists I work with hate working with it, everything seems like a halfbaked implementation of stuff in synapse, adf and Power BI premium but somehow worse, and their documentation is increasingly unhelpful.

  • Heavybell@lemmy.worldEnglish
    70·
    10 days ago

    Fun fact, making extensions for this requires you to learn a new language called X++ that is based on .net framework 4.7. Development is done only on azure-hosted VMs that contain the application code and sql server and web host and visual studio with the special X++ build tools, all on one host that runs like shit at your expense.

    • Occhioverde@feddit.itOP
      44·
      10 days ago

      You don’t want to know.

      If you really want to know

      Microsoft Dynamics 365 is an integrated suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications offered by Microsoft. -Wikipedia

      • [email protected]@lemmy.federate.cc
        18·
        10 days ago

        The entire summary on Wikipedia is sales guy bullshit. It’s barely comprehensible.

        allowing businesses to streamline their operations, improve customer engagement, and make data-driven decisions. The platform is highly customizable, enabling organizations to tailor it to their specific needs and industry requirements. Dynamics 365 is designed to help businesses unify their processes, gain insights into their operations, and foster better relationships with customers.

        Bruh you dropped this: synergize

        • Smee@poeng.link
          3·
          10 days ago

          I understand what they’re saying but I still don’t know what it means.

        • Occhioverde@feddit.itOP
          2·
          10 days ago

          Right, thank you for pointing it out!

          I was using Eternity, but it seems to be no longer maintained, so I’m currently trying out some other alternatives.

          Anyway, the comment should now be fixed.

    • Hotzilla@sopuli.xyz
      5·
      10 days ago

      D365 ain’t really even that bad. It is just model driven power platform app. It is actually quite expandable, you can code it with plain javascript or more complex components on React. Backend is OData which is quite flexible.

      Old Dynamics AX and onprem CRM were shit shows.

  • dazzledbeans @lemmy.world
    31·
    10 days ago

    I was going through azure web app services, who the f names this things.

    Automatic scaling and autoscale are two different things. WTF.

    • floofloof@lemmy.ca
      26·
      10 days ago

      Microsoft always has 20 variants of the same name for maximal confusion. It’s deep in their culture.

        • Faalangst_26@lemm.ee
          6·
          10 days ago

          Also true the other way around, things that sound like the same but are actually different:

          .NET Core, .NET Framework, .NET Standard, .NET

          Bonus points for Microsoft also often using the term “framework” for labeling .NET (Core). And then there of course also is ASP.NET because of course.

          Just great.

          • Lv_InSaNe_vL@lemmy.world
            2·
            9 days ago

            I thought at some point they dropped all those and it’s just .net now?

            Edit: nope, you’re right. Here’s the explanation from Microsoft

            There are multiple variants of .NET, each supporting a different type of app. The reason for multiple variants is part historical, part technical.

            .NET implementations:

            • .NET Framework – The original .NET. It provides access to the broad capabilities of Windows and Windows Server. It is actively supported, in maintenance.
            • Mono – The original community and open source .NET. A cross-platform implementation of .NET Framework. Actively supported for Android, iOS, and WebAssembly.
            • .NET (Core) – Modern .NET. A cross-platform and open source implementation of .NET, rethought for the cloud age while remaining significantly compatible with .NET Framework. Actively supported for Linux, macOS, and Windows.
  • Baguette@lemm.ee
    25·
    10 days ago

    Is it just me or does the third panel person pointing slightly look like an alligator

    • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
      10·
      10 days ago

      My university recently switched most of the student enrollment and stuff to SAP, even though they had a very nice system that was launched only a couple of years prior. SAP is so awful, my god. Apparently the switch was mandated by the government or some crap like that. I’m honestly baffled.

    • jqubed@lemmy.world
      10·
      10 days ago

      The advantage browser-based ones have is it’s generally easy to copy/paste any text you need. I used one that ran as its own desktop software and made many of the key text fields uneditable, instead of letting you copy text from them but refusing to save any changes to those fields that must not change. Want to grab the order number for this customer? Too bad! Type it yourself or export it to PDF and copy it from there! I was so happy when I discovered a little program that lets you copy any text on the screen by effectively taking a screenshot, running OCR on the screenshot, and putting the output onto your clipboard. Still took more effort than simply right-clicking the text and hitting copy, though, or double-clicking and hitting Ctrl-C.

  • ssfckdt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    15·
    9 days ago

    I spent the better part of a year and a half writing automation for an integrated stack that included D365. (RSAT wasn’t an option since we had to also interact with other systems and sql databases and what not to perform end-to-end flows across multiple systems.) It was literally the biggest resource and time suck of all the stuff we had to interact with – and we had to interact with some really hoky stuff. But D365 took the cake. At least two people quit over it.

    • locuester@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      9 days ago

      I did a similar project back in 2003. MS CRM 1.2. MS Great Plains. Integrating with an OS/390 via DB2 and MQSeries. Fun stuff. I survived. MS CRM wasn’t even the biggest pain points!

  • lefixxx@lemmy.world
    10·
    10 days ago

    I have used 3 different ERPs and every one is worse than the other. I am almost curious enough to try dynamics to see what kind of flavor of ERP BS has Microsoft managed to produce

  • nayminlwin@lemmy.ml
    1·
    7 days ago

    I don’t know what happened. Axapta and subsequently Dynamics AX that D365 is being rebranded as is a very respectable system with a lot of history in giant MNC space.