Hello Community, today i posted on twitter my ideas about what i called a "non-commercial" community meeting and sprint.
what i mean with "non-commercial" (probably it's not the best term) is to focus the development on what end-users and clients really need instead of what is needed by the openerp release plan. OpenERP still lacks of many features and this is not an opinion (it's young, so it's normal). We (Domsense) started to provide openerp services mainly because a lot of clients asked us to include features like invoicing and project management into other softwares we use like Plone, not supposed to manage such things. Now, thanks to openerp, we discovered a very interesting market monopolized by few vendors which are too much expensive even for big companies. Now we are working full-time on OpenERP, hiring people, growing fast and appling for the openerp partnership because we want to contribute not only with bug fixing and development. In this situation...from this point of view...it's easy to understand what the software is missing because we receive the same requests by all the clients, every day. And we have clients in different european countries. For example: 1. account entries encoding: It seems that openerp is taking the way of vouchers as default method. That's good, they are doing great improvements regarding vouchers, but... the way an accountant can insert accounting entries is still too much dispersive. Speaking about entries encoding, the most advanced tool in SAP, Dynamics Nav, Sage and other famous softwares is "Recurring Entries". OpenERP already provides this feature, but it's still basic and maybe useles. With recurring entries, accountants manage about the 80% of their job, at least in small and mid-sized company. Please, try to figure out the time an accountant need to register in OpenERP a complex account movement like a payslip or any other movements with a lot of lines. At the moment, we don't have any good template system alongside vouchers or recurring entries, so every time i show openerp to an accountant, he asks me if i'm really serious and if i really know other accountants who use OpenERP. In every accounting software i've seen till now, accountants select the type of movement (template), specify the total amount of the movement then the software automatically creates all the lines of the movement. Few seconds against dozeens of seconds or minutes as in openerp today. that's nothing really complex, but we have to create some sort of formula engine behind this to allow accountants define the amount of every single line and other related things. Nothing to re-invent, just copy other software behaviours :-) 2. reporting engine We at Domsense started the development of Report OpenOffice last year (now maintained by KNDATI guys + other contributors. PS: Thanks!) just because we spent more than 2 days to create a complex invoice template for a customer. Really too much. That was the last time i put my hands on default openerp reports. sxw2rml sucks and we cannot ask our clients to modify an XML file just to apply a bold style to a string. Now we are very happy with Report OpenOffice and NaN's Jasper Reports addon. But there's still a lot of work to do in order to have a well integrated engine in both cases. I think that the actual reporting system must be suppressed as soon as possible or, at least, have other engines easily pluggable by default. We have more than 20 openerp projects active where we had to port the account reports to Jasper because of the amount of time nedeed by some reports like account balance to be printed out. In most cases, default account reports still end in a timeout error. Obviously, you don't notice this issue if you don't manage accounting with OpenERP ;-) Another topic directly related: PrintJob (Thanks to Pegueroles SCP & NaN). Great addon! it saved our life a lot of times! Direct printing is a very common need, so i think that printjob deserves some efforts indeed. I could continue to list other common needs which we really have to implement/improve in OpenERP, but my goal was just bring your attention to the fact that we need to consider the opinion of the end users which are not developers! Indipendently from the OpenERP official release plan, all the companies which provide openerp's related services often need the same things. So, why don't join forces and fill up the gap? Really, we don't need to upset OpenERP and its release plan. We the community can work on unofficial but tested addons without asking OpenERP SA to certify a single line of code. We just need to know that there's a tested addon which solves that issue or fills up that need. Then...in the end...i think that would be very great if this "unofficial" (in the short-time) work could be sponsorized by OpenERP SA by hosting meetings or helping us to analyse the problems. For the moment, the priority is the release of the 6.0 RC1, so we have to wait that moment before starting to talk about a meeting, but we can start today to discuss about those common needs i was talking about by creating a list of topics and issues, making some polls and so on... What do you think? best regards, ------------------------ Davide Corio davide.co...@domsense.com http://www.domsense.com -------------------- m2f -------------------- -- http://www.openobject.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=61189#61189 -------------------- m2f -------------------- _______________________________________________ Tinyerp-users mailing list http://tiny.be/mailman2/listinfo/tinyerp-users
