My Very Large Defense Contractor employer uses a website from American Express for booking travel. They call it The Edge. The site overall does an OK job of getting travel booked. It has some very strange behaviors (for example, a predeliction for only wanting to display flights that depart at 0600 or after 1800). It also has a hard time finding hotels, and an even harder time finding open rooms at hotels, and an even harder time getting the Government per diem room rate. It also will rarely get a better price than the prices on the airline web sites (I know these last two, since I will fire up the aa.com or hilton.com sites and browse them at the same time).
But that’s not what this is about. This evening I needed to book travel, so I brought up the site. The front page has a bunch of travel advisory stuff and the usual screen clutter you might expect, and it has the user ID and password text boxes.
So as soon as the site comes up, my daughter informs me that she needs to bake a cake for the class party tomorrow, and we are out of eggs and milk. Grrr, says Dad, and off to Braums I go. I got back around a half hour later.
I sat back down at the computer, entered my login information on the website, and clicked the Log In button. The site immediately returned a page stating that my session had expired. Huh? I followed the link back to the main page, logged in, and then booked my trip. After all this was done, I logged off and navigated back to the home page, and then I went off to Facebook or something, and came back after about 15 minutes. I tried to log in again, and got the session expired page.
So for some reason, AX bases the session on the load time of the home page, not the load time of the itenerary build page that you get after you log in. Some developer made a dumb choice here. I sent a Feedback in, but I suspect that it will meet the fate of the other Feedback I have sent to The Edge (which is to say, relegation to Oblivion).
