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Office Depot uses a program called ELT StoreFront to print out all new signage. The user enters only the SKU, and StoreFront fetches the pricing information from the mainframe and prints out the required labels. This would be a good thing, except that StoreFront is one of the shoddiest pieces of software I have ever seen foisted upon the world.
First, there is the efficiency issue. Selecting any function can easily lead to a multi-second wait. Printing especially. I really don't know why it could take so long to get the prices and item names from the mainframe, and it goes completely modal while it's doing it. Maybe it's having the mainframe rasterize the page for it.
Which actually wouldn't surprise me too much. Say I've entered 3 pages worth of SKUs and want to print them out to a different printer, because this one's messed up (or because the system is screwed up and they've locked us out of the Task Manager). I just select "Print setup" and choose the printer I want, right? Wrong. The only printer available is some garbage "PowerSuitePrinter", which is hardcoded into whichever printer is usually hooked up to the system.
This also means, although this is likely an Office Depot idiocy, that although we have 2 printers in 1 office, the computer apparently only prints to the first one. Which means that there's a race condition where, if we enter a bunch of SKUs, load the stock, and hit print, and someone up front prints a report, that report ends up on label stock, and the labels end up on plain paper. Which is really lame if we've seen that the job has finally spooled and start entering a new set of SKUs. Good job, guys.
StoreFront appears to be a cheap front-end to Microsoft Access, with all the options set to minimum usability. For example:
The primary annoyance is that when the user reaches the maximum field length (say, for a 6-digit SKU), he or she is automatically advanced to the next field. This means that typos lead to cascading errors. And no, backspace doesn't get you back to the previous field.
Pressing the Enter key moves the user to the next row, but the same column. This means that it requires a minimum of 2 arrow keys (more if the user needs to specify anything more than SKU and quantity) to move to the next row and continue entering data.
Clipboard functions are disabled, and there is no way to save to a file or load from it. This means that if the printer driver on one computer is screwed up, all the data must be entered again on a different machine.
Other things are just broken. Like how right-clicking and selecting "Delete row" on a partially-entered row deletes not only the selected row, but the one above it.
The final indignity is that sometimes StoreFront likes to break with SQL syntax errors. There is no way around this, which means that sometimes a set of SKUs just goes unprinted.
Here is my challenge to Office Depot:
Pay me 10% of what you pay for this pathetic heap of bits, and I will deliver you an application that is faster, more usable, and above all generates syntactically correct SQL queries. You can have the source, too, if you want.
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Last modified: Fri Aug 3 23:25:04 MDT 2001