With the 1.3R release, RMS will not allow PO Numbers longer than 14 characters. Before the 1.3R release, RMS allowed PO Numbers up to 20 characters.
After installing the 1.3R release I reported this defect. The support team responded that this change was by design. They claimed that the change was made to work around a defect - "we had a bug with inter-store inventory transfers erroring out when the PO number is greater than 14 characters".
This type of quick and easy fix (crippling the UI to work around a defect) is just plain wrong for at least a couple of reasons.
1) Customers (like me) who have been using the software for a few years may have evolved business systems that rely on the original capabilities of the software as we bought it. It is not appropriate to take away functionality we have already paid for, and evolved our business around, because you want to save on development costs in fixing defects properly.
2) Microsoft encourages the development of customizations to RMS. With this in mind, it is bad practice to have a field in the database of type nvarchar(20) when populating that field with 20 characters will cause the software to malfunction. You guys need to do a proper fix on the inter-store transfer defect, don't just cripple the UI and call it fixed. Customization developers are going to continue tripping over this defect.
I previously worked at Microsoft in both development and test. I remember all those company wide emails from Balmer urging us to "delight the customer". Well guys, I'm now a customer and I'm not delighted. Let's spend the resources and get this thing fixed properly.
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