Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: A Customer's Self-Service Interface to Bug Tracker!?!

7: Re: A Customer's Self-Service Interface to Bug Tracker!?! (response to 1)

Posted by Robert Taylor on 11/02/06 08:09 PM

as for invoicing - i have not spent a lot of time on this. it seems to me that invoicing should be handled properly by an accounting/reporting package.

torben is porting sql ledger and if you REALLY WANT TO DO THIS RIGHT, you guys might want to talk to him and help him out.

as for the reporting tool, it is hard to say whether or not looking at integrating something like jasper reports would be of any use. it is basically a java library which has a good number of frontends and functions like crystal reports. on the outside its a great open source idea, but oacs already does a lot of this from an architectural standpoint and it might make more sense to take jasper reports and port the 'idea' to this platform with a web based interface to give us the freeform reporting capabilities of crystal should torbens port for example be overkill for a particular client.

9: Re: A Customer's Self-Service Interface to Bug Tracker!?! (response to 7)

Posted by Frank Bergmann on 11/05/06 05:06 PM

Hi Robert,

Thanks for your comments concerning promotion. I agree very much with you concerning possible negative reactions. However, it's important to think about "channels" and to branch away from "current OpenACS habits": Biggest OSS toolkit on earth? Least known toolkit on earth? I firmly believe that you have to experiment (I like your "see what sticks at the wall") and even to accept some negative feedback in order to "get your message through".

you REALLY WANT TO DO THIS RIGHT

Sorry, but I don't agree with that. SQL-Ledger focuses on "double-entry accounting", while ]po[ focuses on "project controlling". There is no right or wrong, just a focus on physical product (with inventory, inventory valoration, depreciation etc.) vs. service enterprises (project profit & loss, employee productivity, cash-flow, etc.). Accounting for service companies is like OpenACS for a static web site - possible, but it requires experts and loads of free time... But btw., the announcement of the SQL-Ledger port is about a year old, are there any news?

reporting

Reporting is "lame" anyway. Data-warehousing is a more flexible and powerful alternative. Checkout Mondrian + JPivot or OpenI for a complete OSS stack.

Btw., we've got our own TCL reporting engine (including groupings and sub-totals per group), but it's not GPLed and it's probably going to stay proprietary. Writing reports is so _incredibly_boring_ ...

Frank

10: Re: A Customer's Self-Service Interface to Bug Tracker!?! (response to 7)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 11/06/06 09:07 PM

Well, to do an accounting system right you need to have a lot of local knowledge in the markets as accounting practices differ from country to country. Therefore our approach is to generate the invoices in OpenACS and then just transfer the list of generated invoices to the accounting program which is certified.

Obviously we could just add the invoice to the internal accounting system based on SQL ledger, but as long as such a solution is not certified by the german tax authorities none of our clients would use it :).

Frank has written a reporting module (non GPL if not mistaken) based on Jasper, so he does have quite some experience in that field.