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I helped a dealer migrate to Arkona several years before it became DealerTrack DMS and I have since made several custom applications that integrate with it. DealerTrack DMS is by no means perfect (the Parts functionality is particularly bad.. I mean what inventory system doesn't have a way to track "lost sales?"), but from an integration standpoint it is leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. They have built in functionality to automatically run data reports and have them sent to a file server every day. More recently, they have provided the OpenTrack initiative that allows authorized third party vendors to have real-time read and/or write access to data within your DMS.

The base DMS weak points I have witnessed closely resemble Shylani's experience:

• The Human Resources and Parts modules, especially inventory management, seem hacked together and not well planned out. This results in users having to work around the DMS and manually force the system to do things it should be able to automatically do.
• The server is not at the dealership and is shared by multiple dealers. When there is a problem, it generally impacts all users at multiple dealerships. They are generally reasonably quick to resolve the issue, but customer service seems to be unresponsive when they already know "the server is down."

...Oops, my "noob" is showing. I just realized this is an older thread, so this feedback may not matter any more for the original poster(s). Guess I'll pay more attention to that in the future.