Standardizing Structures Searching for documents Working with users’ changes Version Management

390 391 Part IX System Administration and Implementation 393 After you have tested and evaluated Open ERP, you will need to configure it to match the software to your company’s needs. Its flexibility enables you to configure the different modules, adapting them to your industry or sector of activity. Designed for ERP project managers, this section deals with the administration and configuration of the system, giving you powerful tools for integrating the software in a company and driving and tracking the project, taking account of different problems, a range of supplier types, implementation risks, and the options available to you. 394 395 CHAPTER TWENTYSEVEN CONFIGURATION ADMINISTRATION This chapter is for the administrators of an Open ERP system. You will learn to configure Open ERP to match it to your company’s needs and those of each individual user of the system. Open ERP gives you great flexibility in configuring and using it, letting you modify its appearance, the general way it functions and the different analysis tools chosen to match your company’s needs most closely. These configuration changes are carried out through the user interface. Users can each arrange their own welcome page and their own menu, and you can also personalize Open ERP by assigning each user their own dashboard on their welcome page to provide them with the most up to date information. Then they can immediately see the information most relevant to them each time they sign in. And Open ERP’s main menu can be entirely reorganized. The management of access rights lets you assign certain functions to specific system users. You can also assign groups to the user, which lets him move system documents from state to state such as the ability to approve employee expense requests. Note: Configuration, Parametrization, Personalization, Customization The word personalization is sometimes used in this book where you might expect to find configuration or cus- tomization. Customization generally refers to something that requires a bit of technical effort such as creating specialized code modules and creates a non-standard system. Configuration is less radical – it is the general process of setting all the parameters of the software to fit the needs of your system often called parametrization or setup. Configuration is also, by convention, the name of the sub-menu below each of Open ERP’s top-level menus that is accessible only to the administrative user for that section. Personalization is just that subset of configuration options that shapes the system to the particular operational andor stylistic wishes of a person or company. Using the OpenOffice Report Designer module you can change any part of any of the reports produced by the system. The system administrator can configure each report to modify its layout and style, or even the data that is provided there. Note: The OpenOffice Report Designer The OpenOffice Report Designer plug-in enables you not only to configure the reports of the basic products in Open ERP but also to create entirely new report templates. When the user uses Open ERP’s client interface, OpenOffice can create a report template that has access to all the data available to any Open ERP document type. You can easily create fax documents, quotations, or any other commercial document. This functionality enables you to considerably extend the productivity of your salespeople who have to send many proposals to customers. Finally, you will see how to import your data into Open ERP automatically, to migrate all of your data in one single go. For this chapter you should start with a fresh database that includes demo data, with sale and its dependencies installed and no particular chart of accounts configured. 396

27.1 Creating a Configuration Module

It is very helpful to be able to backup your specific configuration settings in an Open ERP module dedicated just to that. That enables you to: • automatically duplicate the configuration settings by installing the module in another database, • reinstall a clean database with your own configuration in case you have problems with the initial configuration, • simplify migrations, if you have modified some elements of the basic configuration, there is a risk in returning them to their original state after the migration, unless you have saved the modifications in a module. Start by installing the module base_module_record in the usual way. Manually make all your configuration changes through the user interface as you would normally do such as menu management, dashboard assignments, screen configuration, new reports, and access rights management – details of some of these possibilities are described later in this chapter. Then start recording your data using the menu Administration → Customization → Module Creation → Export Customizations As a Module. This opens a wizard through which you may select the date to record from, choose records that have been Created , Modified or both Created Modified . You have to select the objects for recording and then start recording by clicking Record. After the recording operation is complete, a dialog box appears giving you the opportunity to save the recorded module at a desired location. Open ERP then creates a ZIP file for you containing all of the modifications you made while you were carrying out your configuration work. You could reinstall this module on other databases. This could turn out to be useful if you want to install a test server for your company’s users and give them the same configuration as the production server. To install a new module saved in ZIP file form, use the menu Administration → Modules → Import Module.

27.2 Configuring the menu

Open ERP’s menu organization is not subject to any restriction, so you can modify the whole structure, the terminology and all access rights to it to meet your specific needs in the best possible way. However, before you do all that and just as you would for any other customizable software, you should balance both the benefits you see in such changes and the costs, such as the need to train users, to maintain new documentation and to continue the alterations through subsequent versions of the software. This section describes how to proceed to change the structure of the menu and the welcome page, to configure the terminology of the menus and forms in the user interface and for managing users’ access rights to the menus and the various underlying business objects.

27.2.1 Changing the menu

You can change the way menu items appear and the actions they trigger by using the menu Administration → Customization → User Interface → Menu Items. This opens a search view where you may locate the menu item to be edited by entering its entire name specified as menu hierarchy in the Menu field or specifying its immediate parent menu name in Parent Menu. As an example, locate the menu item AdministrationTranslationsImport ExportExport Translation and click on this entry to open its corresponding form. You could now edit this form but do not do that, read the next paragraph first – change its Parent Menu, which moves the entry to a different part of the menu system; edit its Menu name to change how it appears in the menu tree, or give it a new Icon. Or you could give it a new Action entirely but this would lose the point of this particular exercise. Instead of editing this form, which is the original menu entry, duplicate it. With the web client you must first make the form read-only by clicking the Cancel button, then you click the Duplicate button that appears in the