Odoo Experience 2019 Chronicle
We are still rather new in the ERP business ourselves at CodeSyntax but we have already developed a few projects using Odoo so this year I packed my bags and traveled to Belgium in order to keep studying and also learning what’s new out there.
In order to experience it to the fullest, the days prior to Odoo Experience several Smart Classes were available for those of us who wanted to dig deeper into technical and management stuff: developing in Odoo with odoo.sh, The JS Framework, Advanced accounting with Odoo, IoT and Odoo, etc.
I assisted the class taught by Stanislas Sobieski (from the Odoo developers team) about developing in odoo with the odoo.sh platform. Odoo.sh is a cloud platform for developing and deploying Odoo Enterprise. Although at CodeSyntax we work with the community version, the code and also the way of developing are pretty much the same. With Stanislas we learnt about developing a new module in the most efficient way and especially how inheritance works (for models as well as for views). He was really patient answering all the questions and issues I bombarded him with from my previous work with Odoo ;-)
After two days of classes the conference kicked off. Albeit it being my first time in this encounter, the sheer amount of people gathered there greatly surprised me. IT was by far the crowdiest event of this sort I have ever attended, with 8 parallel tracks an docens of stands for companies and partners swarmed with people.
The main course of the event was Wednesdays keynote by Odoo Founder and CEO Fabien Pinckaers who presented all the new features that the new Odoo 13 brings us, for the Enterprise edition as well as for the community edition. The Aula Magna was full to the brim and it seemed to me, who was assisting this event for the first time, that it resembled a lot those mythical presentations Steve Jobs gave when presenting a new product. No detail was left to chance and Fabien did not disappoint. Although most of the new features will be better appreciated in the Enterprise version, search filters have improved, content edition has been made easier, the integration between modules is more complete and the aesthetics are even better than in the previous edition.
There were two different profiles in the people assisting: those who were focused on the management, consulting, accounting, etc. (most of them) and those like me who were more interested in the insides of the app. In this aspect the talks really did leave me wanting more because most of them were oriented towards the functioning of odoo and it’s workflow and management. Anyhow, there was always a good technical talk awaiting in one of the many tracks.
The duration of the talks was around 20 minutes so even if getting deep in complex technical issues was almost impossible I managed to leave there with vaster knowledge on better ways of developing a new module from scratch, how to make new developments and the frontend fit together and with much needed notions on scalability of deployments, amongst other things.
Being able to spend a few days getting to know new Odoo features as well as getting to know people and companies with realities that sometimes are so similar to ours and other times are light years away, made it an enriching experience. I think that our first visit to the Odoo Experience has been worth it!
