Odoo - distributed business apps

[LoudLemur]

@jdaviescoates said in Odoo - distributed business apps:

@LoudLemur have you actually ever used Odoo? Given you are so enthusiastic about it, I'm guessing perhaps not?!?

I've no doubt that an Odoo expert can make it do all sorts of things that provide all sorts of needs for some companies.

But in my limited experience of playing around with it I found it severely lacking, and with a terribly confusing UX.

Pretty much all the things it does are done MUCH better by other tools that focuses on doing that task rather than hacking together an Odoo module that kinda sorta does it.

Yes, I have used it. I think it is easier if you are able to begin with a philosophy that you are going to grow into Odoo, rather grow Odoo into the way you are. There is a request now for Axelor, which you might like.

https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/1404/axelor-a-flexible-erp-in-java/6

[marcusquinn]

Looks like someone solved the missing Odoo Studio for the community edition. Does look nifty:

• https://odoo-studio.com/

[LoudLemur]

@marcusquinn said in Odoo - distributed business apps:

Looks like someone solved the missing Odoo Studio for the community edition. Does look nifty:

• https://odoo-studio.com/

This is great news, as quite a few people would say that Odoo Studio was a must-have, if you were to run Odoo, but the Studio module is non-Free.

If anybody is in London next week, Odoo are having a live event there in the evening of Tuesday, January the 17th:

https://www.odoo.com/event/odoo-roadshow-london-3628/register

[marcusquinn]

Odoo is an odd framework, because what you see on their SaaS version isn't all open-source, their SaaS version doesn't accept community add-ons, and the community open-source is missing many of the apps the SaaS has, so there's a marketplace for clones of them.

Basically, if you never want to do anything the SaaS doesn't offer, nor get involved with any development, SaaS makes sense for business.

If you find SaaS limitations that you can't build with the SaaS Studio, you need to go community-edition and buy a load of add-ons to reproduce the same, with the then responsibility of maintaining the codebase, but advantage of not being taxed with per-user costs on growth in the number of users.

I like Odoo a lot, it's just a bit quirky, and you are very much either SaaS OR CE, and support is either direct for SaaS or community for CE, neither wants to support the other, and you can't mix — if you choose the SaaS, you can't use any community add-ons or custom code, if you choose CE, you can't use any of the SaaS apps that haven't been open-sourced or cloned by the community.

[makemrproper]

@LoudLemur No I don't like Axelor. I like Odoo.

[makemrproper]

@jdaviescoates said in Odoo - distributed business apps:

But in my limited experience of playing around with it I found it severely lacking, and with a terribly confusing UX.
Pretty much all the things it does are done MUCH better by other tools that focuses on doing that task rather than hacking together an Odoo module that kinda sorta does it.

This is wrong.

It is not confusing and provides a clean UX.

The functionality that it offers out of the standard modules are great, and provides plenty of value as they come.

I have used them for business scenarios on and off for 10 years.

If one wants to customize a system, one needs to learn this which is in itself a tradecraft. In Odoo's case it is similar to customizing Salesforce. This requires a developer attitude.

Please if you want to continue down this rabbit hole discussion, please list tools which are much better suited that replace Odoo.

[jdaviescoates]

@makemrproper said in Odoo - distributed business apps:

@jdaviescoates said in Odoo - distributed business apps:

But in my limited experience of playing around with it I found it severely lacking, and with a terribly confusing UX.
Pretty much all the things it does are done MUCH better by other tools that focuses on doing that task rather than hacking together an Odoo module that kinda sorta does it.

This is wrong.
It is not confusing and provides a clean UX.
The functionality that it offers out of the standard modules are great, and provides plenty of value as they come.
I have used them for business scenarios on and off for 10 years.

It's not wrong, it's just a different perspective.

I was just using their website module which imho was (and very likely still is) "severely lacking, and with a terribly confusing UX" (compared to pretty much any modern website building system, but I was mostly comparing it to WordPress given that's by far the most widely used system).

@makemrproper said in Odoo - distributed business apps:

Please if you want to continue down this rabbit hole discussion, please list tools which are much better suited that replace Odoo.

In this specific instance, fulfilling the needs of this specific client was much easier with WordPress, plus an additional forms plugins (forminator in that case).

@makemrproper said in Odoo - distributed business apps:

I have used them for business scenarios on and off for 10 years.

I think that is likely why you don't find the UX frustrating

I don't doubt for a moment that it's possible to get great value from Odoo - clearly LOTS of people do. But it does seem to need quite a bit of learning before being able to do so effectively.