Legacy software can be a funny thing. I’m fond of reminding people that Salesforce is only built on 30 year old thinking–that’s a long time, but built in a post-web-enabled world it’s managed to remain remarkably nimble.

Concur has been around for a longer time, and recently I got this very frustrating error message when I was trying to enter expenses. Special characters? The dash? Since when? Equally frustrating the error message didn’t give any clues into what a special character was (there were others when I originally tried to submit, and it took a couple of tries to narrow it down to this.)

It’s frustrating when technology gets this out of date. It’s even more frustrating when there doesn’t seem to be any attempt to update it. This feels like a problem that should have been fixed years ago, but given Concur’s installed based it feels like if it hasn’t happened yet it never will. Only time will tell.