Anyone got experience with Odoo? Anyone host it?

It’s looking likely I’m going to be helping a Cooperative Development Body get up and running using Odoo

Anyone out there in the CoTech community that has experience of using it? Anyone host it?

Thanks!

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No to both questions, but the install process looks straight forward, it would need a virtual server and 1GB or 2GB of RAM:

I would expect that writing an Ansible playbook to configure a VM for running it wouldn’t take too long to put together, especially since we already have roles for a couple of the dependencies, wkhtmltopdf and nodejs, I’d probably write a Postgres role for it and I’d assume that a web server would be needed as a reverse proxy — I’m not entirely sure if it comes with a built in one or not, I expect it does,

I think that https://market.fair.coop may be built on Odoo, so there may be some relevant dev expertise amongst the FairCoop crowd.

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Thanks @Graham page source sites indeed seem to indicate it’s Odoo

Hi @jdaviescoates!

We do work with Odoo at Coop IT Easy , we host it and also do custom development for our clients in the social economy. Drop me an email if you have questions :slight_smile: robin[at]coopiteasy.be

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Great, thanks @robin.keunen, will do! :slight_smile:

CoopDevs in catalonia are experimenting with hosting Odoo. Notes from a past convo:
https://github.com/hyphacoop/organizing/blob/master/informational-interviews/2019-04-25-coopdevs-chat.md

I don’t see this in the notes, but I recall that they were learning/deploying it mainly for themselves, and then planning to make it a service offering later

cc: @sauloperez @enricostn

Hi there!

Yep at Coopdevs we’re working with Odoo since 1 year more or less.

You can find a couple of things we’re working on in the following repositories:

In any case I see that @robin.keunen is already in the loop, at Coop IT Easy they have far more experience than us :muscle:

Thanks @patcon for the heads up!

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So how has your experience been? I wonder if there can be some useful worker coop back office system that can be shared across many coops.

Hi, I just helped the UK Faculty Of Clinical Informatics set up their Odoo instance, they are a tiny membership organisation of specialists and they didn’t have the money for any of the CRM platforms they initially looked at - they started looking at SalesForce (which cost more than their entire turnover so far), and then also got quotes for an installation of SuiteCRM and CiviCRM, again the quotes were surprisingly huge.

I got them set up with an Odoo instance which I host for them, and I did the minor modifications necessary to reflect their membership database, and then the initial import of member data. They have only just started using it but seem to find it does what they need. The drag-n-drop website builder alone is a killer feature, with which I was able to create a passable replica of their (expensive, custom-developed) website in about an hour. With the added advantage they can now do their own updates!

I’m UK based and I basically do this and stuff like it as a full time freelancer, operating as a member of thepavilion.io co-op.

Marcus

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I’ve been developing and playing around with a membership system based on user cake and custom PHP content. Happy to share of anyone interested.

After experiencing vendor lock-in with their previous solution one of my clients was in the market for a new ERP. I recommended they find something open source which supports Postgres as they use PostGIS a lot to deliver their main products (maps and reports based on spatial data). They settled on Odoo.

I have had to develop APIs that interface with Odoo to automate parts of the client’s order flow, this has involved using the RPC API, sometimes writing Odoo modules and examining modules in Odoo core.

Another supplier was responsible for delivering and maintaining Odoo but I worked with them closely. These are my main impressions:

Good:

  • Seems incredibly flexible
  • Offers a lot of customisation and configuration options
  • Open source (and you get a lot) & supports Postgres
  • A lot of people use it and there seems to be good community support around technical questions
  • ?debug=1 is your friend.

Bad:

  • ?debug=1 is your friend.
  • Customisation development can be met with surprises, phrases like “Odoo weirdness” became part of the developer nomenclature.
  • An annoying 30 day expiring trial nag screen means all users get locked out of the dev and staging versions every 30 days until a key is entered or a database field is changed.
  • Odoo 10 (Python 2.7) seems very synchronous; I am not sure if that is fixed in Odoo 11 but, if not, and process automation in high volume/moderate load environments can require some complication of architecture.
  • Apparently the ORM layer (again as experienced on Odoo 10) produces some hideous queries that result in serious slowdowns; my experience of this is not direct though so I cannot say whether this is a result of poor database management. It being an ORM problem would not surprise me though.

My advice would be that be prepared for non-linear progress; as customisation goes up, transaction volume goes up, and user volumes go up the chance of getting caught out by some performance-impacting weirdness in Odoo core also goes up.

Of course, clunky ORM layers are sort of par for the course with highly flexible systems existing in the OO and relational database paradigm.

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