Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: ]project-open[ V3.2.Beta4 Released (V3.2 RC 1)

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
A little bit of background on this story (take a look at http://e4.cognovis.de to see what the project is all about).

The E4 project aims to provide a collaboration platform for clusters and virtual organizations with a focus on finding the right partners (take your freelancer module and enhance it by automatically filled in Key Performance Indicators) and allowing them to coordinate using a collaborative project management system which will feed into a multitude of PM systems actually installed at the clients site. It is explicitly *NOT* an ERP solution, and definitely not target towards service companies. Meaning, any of your products and customers you are targeting is nothing the E4 system will deal with.

For a complete open source ERP solution, look at http://www.tooleast.org/. Again, focus is on manufacturing, not services. Still they need project management and suppliers.

As written, our goal is exploitation of the final result of the product. Due to the fact that none of the development partners had a solution for CRM and project management, I got OpenACS based CRM and PM into it, as I knew it well and know that it meets the criteria. The question is now only, should we really use this or use something else for the final product and who will maintain the CRM and PM part taking into account that we are not a full development partner in this project.

With regards to the demo server: I could not find one of the 3.2 version on your site and I am going to talk about process oriented project management at an ERP conference tomorrow in Switzerland where I will show what we are doing in the E4 project and what OpenACS has to offer with that regard. I assumed it would be nice to mention and maybe show the latest version of ProjectOpen there as well. So it is not at all related to the E4 project and although an understandable assumption (we demo something we will "lend" from projectopen), this is neither the intention nor the case here. But well, too late anyway now...

For the record, I don't see PO as a competitor as they are selling a product. Sadly reselling this product is costly (20% from the total revenue generated with the client, Frank, correct me if something changed from our discussions), especially if you need to do a lot of modifications.