配置与系统管理

This chapter is for the administrators of an OpenERP system. You will learn to configure OpenERP to match it to your company’s needs and those of each individual user of the system.

OpenERP 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 OpenERP 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 OpenERP’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 customization.

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 OpenERP’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 and/or stylistic wishes of a person or company.

Using the OpenOffice Report Designer module (base_report_designer), 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 OpenERP, but also to create entirely new report templates. When the user uses OpenERP’s client interface, OpenOffice can create a report template that has access to all the data available to any OpenERP 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 OpenERP 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.