openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Fabien Pinckaers <fp@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>
>
> *Fabien said:* for migration, use OpenERP Entreprise !
>

Yes, here is why I am convinced it's the right way to build a sustainable
business:

1/ partners that resell OpenERP Enterprise sees new versions and upgrades
as new business opportunities (you can offer new features, ...)
2/ companies that do not use OpenERP Enterprise sees migrations as a
painful process that costs a lot and they try to avoid it. They stick to
old versions until it becomes a nightmare to manage (exactly like in the
SAP world where customers have to switch and leave their solution after 7
years)

And here are the result in the long term:

1/ partners with OpenERP Enterprise have customers that evolve with the
software. You can propose new features every year, your bugs are fixed and
pushed in the stable branch, ... They are able to deliver more and more
values to their customers through new versions, bugfixes that are ported in
the stable branch, ...

2/ Those that try to do everything by themselves don't do too much
migrations as it's a painful and costly process [0]. They do their own
hacks to deliver something but it's not a good quality enough [1] They
usually have customers running on old versions on OpenERP and have
difficulties to deliver more services to them. Most of legacy code ends up
not evolving anymore [2]

[0] Why is it cheaper to go through our own services? because we share the
effort on thousands customers. We build a great platform once, strong
process with people that do migrations every day and become very good in
that. In the future, we think we will be able to migrate (code+data)
localisations module for just 50 EURO (because we divide the cost amongst the
total number of customers). This is a real solution to the sustainability
problem of localisation modules in some countries.

[1] Why I think a DIY approach or OpenUpgrade is not a good service?
Because a new version is around 200 man*days of preparations to develop a
clean migration system. Our service, for one specific version, becomes very
good after we have migrated 100 customers because it's very complex to
detect all the small details required for a clean upgrade. If you do it
yourself, you will miss most details and you will detect bugs every week
during 3 months after the migration. Not a good service for a customer.

[2] One year after the release of the v7 ,in countries where we don't have
that much OpenERP Enterprise, account modules are not ported to v7 yet. Can
you imagine asking your customer to wait one year if he needs to evolve?
This is not a good service. Just have a look at the module graveyard of
modules from v6.1 that are still not ported to v7. If everyone would have a
maintenance contract that allows upgrade, OpenERP would not have such
sustainability problems.

*But:*
>
> 1- I use OpenERP community module to be able to have OpenERP that can do
> the job for my french company (Services on OpenERP, OpenSource ..)
>

Everyone uses community module.
And our migration services are organized to work on top of this efficiently.


> 2- I have no OpenERP entreprise now, because when they do a migration,
> they migrate the core, and deactivate other modules. but how can you
> migrate crm.meeting to calendar.event if community module add some date on
> it ? how OpenERP take care of this ?
>

No, that's not what we do.

We give you a database where the core is upgraded and your modules are
still there but you have to continue the migration on your own modules. (or
we also have a service where we cover 100% of the job, for just 800 EURO per
1000 lines of code).


>
> How do you manage this ?
> By migrating I think: migrate code, view but also Existing Datas.
>

Yes, our service covers everything:
  - upgrade of the code (code, adaptation to new report engine, ...)
  - migration of the data
  - tests
  - plateform to automate the process so that you can replay it when you
want
  - unlimited bugfixes tickets related to the software or the migration
service.

Oh, and it does not cost anything to upgrade! You can even ask us to
upgrade a v6.1 customer in v7 just to organize a demo to him to sell him
new features:services. Even if you are not sure he will upgrade, you can
ask us to upgrade; just to test.



Fabien