openerp-community team mailing list archive

[John Bradshaw FOSS <foss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 16/02/14 01:33, Eva Pinter wrote:

> 2. Open source is not important for small enterprises, but for middle 
sized companies, it is really a game changer.
I don't see any connection between enterprise size and their preference 
for FOSS or closed source.

My employer uses FOSS extensively - including OpenERP.  We have 25 
employees in total.
The Managing Director just wants "what's best for the business"... the 
technical people work out the details and if that means FOSS or closed 
source that's fine.

When we looked at ERP the choices were SAP, Sage, OpenBravo and OpenERP 
so a wide range of prices/features/licenses/... originally.

My previous employer also used FOSS - for example Linux was used in 
products they sold as well as for inhouse IT.... they had over 100k 
employees at one time.


> 4. The fact that support is done by sending e-mails is not great. 
There is no clear follow-up possible for users => user experience is not 
great => bad publicity.
As a end-user with OPW it would be good to have a portal to monitor the 
bugs and issues we log through our partner.
I'm happy for our support partner to triage and log bugs but would like 
to see the status myself.


> 5. Do not compare to SAP. OpenERP is far from what SAP can do.
Agree... one of the reasons we selected OpenERP was its EDI capability.
We've since found out that it's not "proper EDI" and now have 
consultants implementing a proper X12 EDI interface via bots (an Open 
Source EDI translator).
We plan to release code and documentation at project completion so 
others can add this missing feature.


>6. The biggest asset of OpenERP is the full integration.
True... we want a Single Point of Truth for everything in our 
organisation... orders, manufacturing, shipping, etc.  OpenERP offers 
most of it now.


What else?
Clearer communication - for example we're on 6.1 which is end of support 
in April.  Start? middle? end?  Don't know.
Future Plans - how do end-users influence 8.0 and other future 
releases?  Does OPW give us any/more say in this?
Off the shelf - some standard apps (purchasing for one) are weak 
(especially when compared to sales)... would be good to get more into 
the standard build so the standard
downloaded version is easier to access.  It's great that others are 
using the software as a framework but please don't forget the ERP users!


Regards,
John.