Meeting minutes with Fabien

On September the 16th a meeting between Fabien Pinckaers and members of the OCA board took place to discuss current items of interest to the community.  Representing the OCA was Eric Caudal, Maxime Chambreuil and Joël Grand-Guillaume.  The meeting was constructive, reaffirming the OCA’s desire to assist Odoo, update Odoo on activities within the OCA and for Odoo to update us on their current positions on hot topics. A summary of the meeting follows.

A market analysis was performed showing that Odoo is well positioned compared to its competitors regarding the public pricing. To be noted though that what matters in the end is the final one-to-one negotiation with the customer.

The market analysis needs formatting and will be shared later on with the community.

OpenERP SA has nevertheless improved the competitiveness of the current pricing with several decisions:

• Website and Ecommerce applications now count as a single app for pricing purposes.  Previously this was 2. The same applies to billing and accounting.  This brings the total number of apps from 12 down to 10.
• A 10% discount has been added to the initial public price in reduction of the partner's margin. Fabien's stated it will have only a very slight impact on partners margin as 90% of the partners' offers were already discounted. He said he believes the effect is limited to reducing the public perception of price,
• Additional services will be added soon to the contract: tutorial and 24/7 level 1 support chat.
• On price negotiation with final customer, the decision is on the partner side to adjust the final offer with its margin.

In the case of several partners engaged with a single customer, OpenERP SA cannot ensure that the customer will not receive inconsistent offers but the teams are trying their best to avoid it. In the event you feel this may be the case please talk to your Odoo Account Manager.

The programs were abandoned for cost reasons and lack of interest (Less than 15% of the partners passed the certification) while they had no clear benefits on the training sales.

The current v7 certification is still valid and promoted online. The deadline to pass the exam is 31 October. However, there will be no v8 certification.

When a new version of Odoo is released, Odoo may decide to deprecate some modules out of the core addons. OCA can continue the maintenance of those modules but module deprecation is not a decision taken lightly: either the module is not so useful anymore or it is not stable enough and OCA needs to be aware of that.
 

However customers’ timelines may not be compatible with the editor’s decision the extra maintenance period offered by OCA will prove mutually beneficial for the transition.

Technical documentation is now available with four documents and training manuals (here: http://odoo.com/documentation and in Github: github.com/odoo/odoo).

In parallel, a crowdfunding campaign will be prepared for the designer documentation.

As for functional documentation, the situation is not that clear. Tools and tooltips will be available in v9 while the main functional documentation project will be available in Github with online editing for easy use. It is not planned to have documentation directly integrated in Odoo.

The Odoo Enterprise contract offer already provides integrated videos and training material accessible directly in the instance of the customer.
 

One point which is still not satisfactory is that there is currently no centralized entry point for the documentation. OpenERP SA is working on it and will propose a new structure and centralization with no decision yet on which chapter will be done them and which by the community.

OCA would like to achieve more visibility for the modules hosted under the OCA umbrella. Fabien agrees on the principle and we need to work together on the method to achieve it (we do not want to change the manifest but would rather find a way in the description to filter the information).

The apps repository will include end of October 2014 useful features such as comments or rating that should improve overall visibility of the modules.
 

OpenERP SA will launch his next crowd funding campaign to enable professional designers involvement in developing themes and CSS for Odoo website modules.

A workshop to improve the accounting in v9 has been started by Quentin De Paoli and meeting is planned on October the 14th and 15 with on site and web conference.

Generic core requirements will be separated from localizations with localization targets (countries) to be determined. They will meet with Odoo community members specializing in accounting to achieve it.
 

The detailed specifications of the v9 accounting will be communicated the 10th of October and will be challenges by the community during the workshops of October the 14 & 15.

MRP is currently a sensitive topic for the community, where several MRP-related projects and communications have emerged in the last months around the subject. OCA has centralized the community efforts in an initiative to collect the requirements of the users and summarize them as a first scope of work. The objective was not to focus on the how but more on the what and use it as a first estimate to discuss the MRP project for v9 with Fabien.
 

He has not made any decision yet about starting this project for v9 and OCA could help by funding the project through a crowd funding campaign.
 

A first gap analysis is required and Fabien will come back to the OCA with his decision on willingness to move forward, how to finance it and eventually an estimate of the cost.