Odoo, Open ERP and CRM, Continues to Build Out its Platform

Each year when InfoWorld comes out with its Bossie awards, it honors the best open source applications. This year, one of the honorees was Odoo. As the publication's editors noted: "Formerly OpenERP, this project recently changed its name to Odoo. Newly released, version 8 brings many improvements, including a website builder, e-commerce, online events, Google Calendar sync and alerts, new warehouse management, a new reporting engine, better BI and data analysis, POS (point of sale) hardware integration, a new API, live chat/email marketing, and social media integration. The improvements are ambitious."

Indeed, Odoo deserves more attention from many businesses. Here is how it may work for you.

Odoo bills itself as an open source ERP and CRM platform. You can watch a video of it in action here. 

The platform is built on Python and web-based, including a PostgreSQL database. It also has a very robust ecosystem of third-party add-ons that you can use to extend the platform. You can add point-of-sale applications, financial applications and much more.

Odoo also has twin free and commercial arms. Two users can use the platform for free and evaluate it. Businesses that want support can opt for a commercial offering.

There is also online training for Odoo available here, as well a complete library of documentation and even instructional YouTube videos.

Odoo was originally known as OpenERP until May of 2014. It was rebranded because version 8 of the software included apps including a website builder, e-commerce applications, and business intelligence modules. Essentially, it expaned beyond ERP and CRM.

It's worth watching some of the introductory videos and looking through the documentation. Every year, this platform gets a little more robust.