OpenDoor

Open Door was a Unix and SQL-based Payroll and HR product.  It was based on a sophisticated data model and designed to cope with the complex requirements of Health and Local Authority customers as well as commercial organisations.

Technologies used were Unix and the Ingres RDMS.  I think Ingres was chosen because it conformed to a lot of standards and had a lot of transactional "stuff" built in to ensure data integrity (you can see why I'd never have made a programmer or Sales person).

As I recall, in those days there was a lot of bragging and arguing about database standards and consistency.  This was before Microsoft, Oracle and to a lesser extent IBM worked out how to dominate databases by a combination of Mergers Acquisitions and killer marketing - but I digress (again).

The product was "green screen" using some kind of forms technology that now escapes me - it may have been part of Ingres.

There were a lot of clever features (for the time) like automatic generation of employee numbers and support for check digits.  It had good support for multiple jobs - which was rare in those days and if I remember correctly a "quick calc" to run an almost instant Gross to Net for an individual employee too.

It had some really clever search functionality too - one could search for data in a form by populating one or more fields, and by using single or multiple wildcards.

I remember getting sent to Crewe one February (I remember as it was Valentines' and I was not long married which went down really well) to discuss the system with some folk from British Rail.  They had their own homebrew mainframe system but wanted to see if they could replace it with OpenDoor.

They wanted several days of evaluation "workshop" and were prepared to pay.  Things got off to a bad start with employee numbers.  Their homebrew system used National Insurance Number as the key to everything, and they utterly refused to take any system that didn't seriously.  If you need to know why this is a bad idea I have (as the popular meme has it) some ocean front property in Arizona you may be interested in - although it must've worked for them at the time.

I don't know why OpenDoor was eventually canned - I suspect it was like a car maker who thinks they have "overlapping" brands.  I'd already left when it happened.

I know that as a trainer for OpenDoor and PS2000 products, the customers I dreaded were the ones who were "downsizing" from Unipay.

They expected (not entirely unreasonably in my view) that the other products would bear some resemblance to the Unipay they knew and loved.  They didn't.