[Vtigercrm-developers] Cooperation - part 1

[Pabiszczak, Błażej]

*Introduction (boring, you can skip it ;)*

OpenSaaS has dealt with the implementations of Vtiger software for five
years. I, as the owner of the company, have seven years of experience with
it. We maintain an active contact with the community in Poland and we are
eager to help others, often behind official channels.

Cooperation with Vtiger has always been complicated. Our first obstacle was
the English language that is used in the software. Then, our second
obstacle was the fact that the producer perceived us as “necessary evil”
and/or “competitors”.

OpenSaaS has been implementing Vtiger 6 (from the first alpha versions)
since a year, because it is a huge step in comprehending business
applications, even at the expense of stability that our company corrected
during tests at the end customer.

We placed our hopes on the producer thinking that if something that was
released in 6.0 version was unstable, it will be corrected in 6.1 version.
We reported over 100 errors during six months (a lot of them beyond
trac.vtiger.com). Additionally, we did not report hundreds of other errors
since they seemed so obvious that it would not make any sense.

*Cooperation (also boring and you can skip it ;o)*

It is surprising, how difficult a contact with the producer can be, even
though the considerable majority of reported errors regarded the
development of their application. I will divide it into subsections in
order to make it more transparent:

1. Modules
As one of the largest Vtiger software producers in the world, we reposed
our trust in the producer. Unfortunately, in spite of many attempts to
communicate we gave up, and what induced us to do so was:
an attempt to publish modules for 5.4 version took many months (to no
effect, in spite of sending many emails and reminders) - our concerns were
completely ignored by Vtiger
difficulties regarding the modification of system files (unfortunately,
there was no possibility for 5.4. version to create modules differently,
the exception were modules of “hello world” type)
When after two years, we managed to reach a compromise and the producer
promised to find the time and publish modules, it turned out that they
started to reject the colour of fonts or, in more extreme cases, odd visual
elements. It would be acceptable, if the producer themselves fulfilled
these assumptions at least in 10% in their modules.
Although our modules have been installed on hundreds of servers, the
producer did not want to accept them and crated more problems. This problem
concerned a very simple module and we had dozens of other modules for
publication that were far more complicated than that.

That is why we gave up the publication of modules for Vtiger.

2. Reporting errors
We do not understand why the producer ignored many of errors that we
reported. After six months of reporting and ignoring them by the designer,
we finally stopped adding them to trac.vtiger.com

A lot of errors that we reported stayed either unresolved (although they
were marked as solved) or was completely ignored. For us trac, turned out
to be impractical.

Many times we suggested ready-made solutions for problems but they were
always ignored. Even our numerous requests for adding one line of code to
files of the engine were impossible to be fulfilled by the producer.

We cannot cooperate this way.

3. Partnership
Partnership would probably exist if we paid the producer. However, our
values are somewhere else and they have never been appreciated.

*Priorities*

I am going to omit certain problems, such as community that does not exist,
documentation that is missing or the fact that users of the software are
often ignored. Now, Vtiger is becoming more and more commercialised. I
could provide many examples but it is not my aim.

An end customer, who the producer wants to acquire, is the biggest problem.
Currently, small companies and individuals are the most important customers
for Vtiger. Their main objective is to develop their cloud that constitutes
their part of profits. Obviously, the producer decides on its own in which
direction they would like to develop, but it created a lot of problems:

Quantity, not quality
The producer aspires to create an average product that is delivered to an
end customer without prior testing. There have been a lot of minor
functionalities created in order to make it possible to compare the product
with other software, such as SugarCRM or Sales Force. In fact, there are
created defective semi-finished products that are not acceptable for the
regular customer.

What has been done with the modules:
Trouble Ticket
Calendar
Google Sync
Mail Manager
Reports
implies that the producer does not respect end users. I am not going to
describe problems with these modules (and many others) because who used
them knows what I am writing about.

I regard deleting part of the functionalities from 6.0 version and not
restoring them by eight months as an act of ignorance.

Although we sent ready-made solutions for migration errors from 5.4 version
to 6.0 version to vtiger-list, they were not corrected for months and I
will leave it with no comments.


Shop
What the producer does with the shop is the indicative of software
commercialisation and the preference of own solutions over the solutions of
partners as well as it is also the sign of ignoring the needs of
communities.

Performance
Nobody, who have not tried to do the following things, will understand this
problem:
import millions of data,
implement the software in companies larger than 100 users.
It is incredible what Vtiger did in the calendar in Vtiger 6 (it is only
one of many examples). During the past few months, we have introduced the
software in a few very large companies, we have spent a lot of time on
improving the logistics in generating the calendar. The basic functionality
of the software is useless without a few days spent on amendments in the
code.

Although everyone makes mistakes, that situation made us think. If we take
existing errors in Vtiger into consideration, we will come into the
conclusion that the producer has not introduced their product in any large
company. Any big implementations would require cooperation with partners
such as OpenSaaS and many days of work to optimise the current code and
introduce patches.

If I were wrong, that would mean that the producer does not introduce any
patches to Vtiger community version.

*Summary*

We think that current direction of the development of the software is
detrimental to the community. The further cooperation in this direction is
not possible for us. Only radical changes can rebuild our trust.


Z poważaniem / Regards
Błażej Pabiszczak
M: +48.884999123
E: b.pabiszczak at opensaas.pl
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.vtigercrm.com/pipermail/vtigercrm-developers/attachments/20140728/08dc0ac9/attachment.html>