Gauss Interprise’s VIP Portal Manager

Let it be known that Gauss Interprise’s VIP Portal Manager is an awful product and that there technical support is
comically hopeless.

The content management UI is unusable unless you have a
huge monitor to keep all the windows from overlapping.

There is an admin tool used to create new websites but
those websites will not work properly unless you go add
some entries to a config file, in a way which is very badly
described deep in a part of the manual which is nowhere
near the part about creating new websites.

The examples contain several magic numbers with no
explanation of what they mean or where they can be found.
It turns out that they are an essential part of the system
and that they can be seen by using the cursor to widen the
leftmost column in a list box. The column is set to 0
pixels by default so there is no visual clue that the
column is even there.

There technical support team just repeat the obscure error
messages back at me, adding the odd ‘in’ or ‘the’ word.
Then they say things like It’s in one of the manuals
somewhere but we don’t know where.

Essential functionality such as adding new meta-infomation
fields for documents is seen as a cutting-edge hack
requiring editing of internal config files, with general
warnings about bad things happening if you do this at the
wrong time.

Whenever you change these text files you need to make
identical changes to similar files in 3 other places.
Immediately. Bad things will happen if you do not get this
right.

There doesn’t seem to be any way to move documents to other
parts of the site – i.e. You can’t reorganise your site
structure.

Also, it’s incredibly unstable both on the client and the
server, exhibiting a variety of ways of simply not working.
The client can’t be used together with a JAVA_HOME
environment variable, making it impossible to use the
client at the same time as most Java development
environments.

Furthermore, it’s based around an ancient version of the
JDK, which ought to demonstrate that it hasn’t been
actively developer for ages.

I do hope that advogato diaries get indexed by search
engines, because there isn’t much more information about
this system on the web.