Back from OpenERP Community days 2013

So here is my completely non exhaustive summary of these 3 days.

1) OpenERP Community Association

I think this is a great initiative from a few partners attempting to clean up the community branches and provide a structure for shared development. Let’s hope many contributors will join and cooperate. While I understand the target, I think the association must have two levels for projects registration: full community based and simple references of other open-source initiatives. The main reason being that transferring intellectual may not be acceptable for some contributors or simply impossible for some projects.

2) New connector for Magento

Looks like a nice rework and a first successful shared funding attempt.

3) Belgian localization.

I cross my fingers, the two first points may be inspiring for solving some issues around contributed modules including financial localization for Belgium …

4)  OpenERP as a CMS and e-shop. 

I understand the strategy, this may be achievable. But I think it twill take a couple of years before OpenERP can equal the web leaders. Those who attended Antony session will understand my point : I know Drupal, Joomla are sometimes difficult to use… but they do also a lot of things, require competencies and have a learning curves .. so does it with OpenERP…

5) Presentation of the new warehouse management for OpenERP version 8. 

Great initiative from c2c again ! I will try to come back on the new concepts, rules and quants. It is promising and should solve many issues we have with stock management including cost computation, traceability and performance. To be tested end of the year (in trunk).

5) Accounting workshop

We had a great workshop about accounting with Quentin. At least he now has points to add on the roadmap… Personally I really enjoyed these workshop sessions, especially with friendly faces…
I will try to get back the pad and publish it as it is…

6) Pentaho reporting

I attended a last minute schedule session about Pentaho reporting. Finally, one report engine that is accessible to functional people… If they solve a few issues (like support of translatable field): we might be saved.

7) New API expected in version 8

Shame on me, I missed the new API presentation expected for version 8 but I favored accounting workshop and Pentaho reports … I suppose the presentation slides will be posted soon. I heard a lot of positive feedback on these changes.

8) News from the testing crypt

C2c presentation over testing. The presentation was more general than what I expected but remember at least that OEScenario is  now full Python. No need to learn Ruby…

9) When can we expect version 8 ? 

No official word, but we are a few to believe mid 2014 is a reasonable target.