OpenERP 漫游指南

Starting to discover OpenERP, using demonstration data supplied with the system, is a good way to familiarize yourself with the user interface. This guided tour provides you with an introduction to many of the available system features.

You would be forgiven a flicker of apprehension when you first sit at your computer to connect to OpenERP, since ERP systems are renowned for their complexity and for the time it takes to learn how to use them. These are, after all, Enterprise Resource Planning systems, capable of managing most elements of global enterprises, so they should be complicated, should not they? But even if this is often the case for proprietary software, OpenERP is a bit of an exception in the class of management software.

Even though OpenERP is a comprehensive software, the user interface and workflow management facilities are quite simple and intuitive to use. For this reason, OpenERP is one of the few software packages with reference customers in both very small businesses (typically requiring simplicity) and large accounts (typically requiring wide functional coverage).

A two-phase approach provides a good guide for your first steps with OpenERP:

  1. Using a database containing demonstration data to get an overview of OpenERP’s functionality (described in this chapter, OpenERP 漫游指南)
  2. Setting up a clean database to configure and populate a limited system for yourself (described in the next chapter, 如何应用到你的业务中?).

To read this chapter effectively, make sure that you have access to an OpenERP server. The description in this chapter assumes that you are using the OpenERP web client unless it states otherwise. The general functionality differs little from one client to the other.