What do you dislike about DocStar ECM?
Where to begin! First of all, put it this way: Epicor just charged us for an annual renewal and *we aren't even fully live yet.* Our experience has been a litany of promises not met by the support staff or the product itself. A few favorites:
- The security model is inflexible. In our setup we have basically branches and a main office. We need to have certain people at each branch to be able to submit/approve documents, and then others at the main office be able to approve/process. It's possible that a user might switch roles or offices (we've had promotions, etc.) This seemed completely mystifying to them. Whereas every other program I manage has a model based on roles and locations, and works fine, they said (and I'm quoting the e-mail still in my inbox): "This problem has had myself and my team spinning."
- Our $225/hr consultant, who's since left the company, told my developer that he started on the support team taking calls. I have nothing against growing internally with a company, but in this case he wasn't at the level to be to design complex workflows. Another consultant was helping us troubleshoot when suddenly performance took a huge nosedive -- turned out an index was missing on a database table. When my in-house developer (who has a masters in Com Sci) asked if there were any scripts to determine if the database was up to spec, and add any missing indexes, etc, the consultant "uhh no. That sounds like a good idea though." Multiple times my developer has had to stop Epicor employees from doing stupid things on their own product, or write views or otherwise show them better ways of doing things.
- They use "grids" to store metadata about a document, which is fine except we continually live in fear that all users have access to change all elements of a grid. We might have a payable item up and a change to metadata might then totally bork the workflow.
- There are many weird quirks about the UI. They stack navigation elements in the reverse order of what we'd expect, which makes the visual hierarchy odd. Example: the sidebar for a document says Line Items, Content Fields, History, Workflow. Workflow is what you're going to use most, so why is it at the bottom? Why are there multiple Save/Submit buttons, that seem to trigger each other? Also the sidebar has a narrow auto-hiding scroll bar that's very difficult to see. Without a clear affordance, my users don't even know the options are there.
- Multiple times support has said "oh, apply this hotfix". A hotfix being a special narrow update for a problem and not a full release. Doesn't inspire confidence in the development cycle.
- For connecting our ERP, Dynamics GP, to a Docstar lookup (i.e. "click here to load this document in Doctar") Cody provided... a single e-mail with 12 lines of code. That's it. No recommendations about how to implement it, where it goes, what other customers have done, etc. The AP functionality was billed as a key feature of Docstar.
- A lot of the capture functionality is in a systray application, and the Web app complains you need to install it. I get that can help with some scanners and such, but we use Citrix and thin clients. In my mind the product should be Web first, and helper apps should be optional add-ons. We are only using network scanners anyway, not USB. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
