Aaron,

If in PC Cort you'll be dealing with no more than 2K to 3.5K employees you
maybe O.K. if more than that I predict you'll be having some problems since
most large organizations have additional requirements to track/maintain.
It has been a little over 1 year that we are using the PC version of Cort
payroll and there are lots of scars to show for it.  Here is a partial list:

1.  Constant hardware updates.  Although during the early phases of
negotiations 'Cort' indicated that our existing network configuration would
be more than adequate we went from a 486 machine to Pentium to Pentium/Pro
to NT 3.51 with Ultra Wide SCSI drives to NT 4.0 and a separate 100Mega Bit
network segment.

2.  Slow processing.  Report that would take just a few minutes on the 3K
take hours on the NT server.

3.  Data base corruption.  We were spending hours and hours recovering the
database due to actual data corruption and also to misdiagnosed corruption
due to a bug in the verification process.

4.  Partial reports.  Once some internal 'spoolfile' limit was reached the
remanding report would be discarded without any notification of the problem.

5.  No batch.  There is no way, at least Cort has failed to provide one, to
execute a report in batch.  Even if you could place all the needed responses
in a file there is no way to direct the different report program to read the
needed parameters from a file.

6.  Counter problems/overflows.  When reports are executed progress is being
show on different windows.  It sure would be nice if you could configure how
often that counter is updated (every 500, 1000..) instead you are being
slowed down viewing the counters.  In addition some counters are limited to
32767, once that value is reached the report terminates.

7.  Alphanumeric payroll numbers.  They are allowed only in some contexts.

8.  Difficulty updating master data.  If you 'refresh' employee information
from an external source you cannot 'blank out' fields that had a value in
them.

9.  Support.  Their favorite line is 'You are not using the system the way
it was designed to be used'.


Just a few things  that come to mind.

Paul Christidis

______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Cort and the HP 3000
Author:  AA <[log in to unmask]> at CCGATE
Date:    03/23/98 13:35


Hello all,

I have been a Cort user for years on the HP3000.  I am loving the Cort
PC package that we are going to.  Most of the users I have spoken with
are also moving and many were going to convert before the letter about
the HP going away.  We looked at options and found NONE!  Cort holds
so much detail that other options were not going to be able to have
any meaningful data conversion.

The PC stuff is really good and you don't do your firms any good by
not even looking at it.

Aaron Anderson