Jeroen Baten - Open Source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) with Odoo

Abstract

With more than 8 million daily users of Odoo worldwide, this talk aims to introduce the audience to the state-of-the-art of Odoo as an ERP solution, as it currently stands.

Odoo has started as a product of Belgian company Odoo S.A. and it comes in 2 flavors: the LGPL-licensed Community Edtion with some 450 different apps/modules, and the OPL licensed Enterprise Edition with closed source add-ons to the CE version. There is also the OCA, the Odoo Community Association.

This creates an interesting triangle of forces between users, Odoo S.A. and the OCA. Nice stuff developed by the OCA can be added by Odoo S.A to the CE edition, and the OCA has been known to re-implement nice functionality of the Enterprise Edition into open source licensed addons/modules. Where Odoo S.A. offers upgrades of EE via their internal black box process, the OCA offers upgrades of CE using a project called OpenUpgrade.

Odoo internally works with apps and these are conceptually like OO programming languages. You can inherit an app and extent it, or inject or disable parts of it. Combined with the earlier mentioned triangle of forces this creates not a race to the bottom but a race to the top, whereby the top is infinite. At the same time it creates a balance that needs to be guarded by all users worldwide IMHO.

You can manage multiple companies in one Odoo instance with a single database. But it is also possible to have one instance of Odoo using several separate databases, one for every individual domain name.

Biography

Let’s be honest here. I love to stand in front of an audience and tell stories. Stories about geek and nerd stuff, IT, software, development, anything.

You can find a lot of stuff on my company lecture page so I don’t have to write things twice. :-). Have a look at some of the talks. Maybe some of them are of interest to you too.

Spreker