[Vtigercrm-developers] Cooperation - part 1

Tue Jul 29 09:56:49 GMT 2014

Hi
It is good to hear.
Is there any chances of extending the api aside soa?

Thanks

Sent from my HTC

----- Reply message -----
From: "Sreenivas Kanumuru" <svk at vtiger.com>
To: "vtigercrm-developers at lists.vtigercrm.com" <vtigercrm-developers at lists.vtigercrm.com>
Subject: [Vtigercrm-developers] Cooperation - part 1
Date: Tue, Jul 29, 2014 14:18

Thanks for sharing these, Blazej. You have recently lent your voice for adding the 'install from file' button in the Extension Store, and we did it.  We respect your opinion. (Infact, i emailed you a month ago to get your feedback but didn't receive your reply).

While more remains to be done, I am pleased with the progress we have made since January on several aspects

Extensions Store coming soon to make it easy for publishers to distribute modules to more usersDedicated team in Vtiger, for resolving trac issues.
Focus on improving APIs to allow developers to write powerful extensionsFocus on better Documentation  - New site - community.vtiger.com/help
Marketplace site will soon feature developers section to allow developers to promote their services (not just extensions). 

I responded to your points below. 

Why Vtiger doesn't publish some 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.

We want to see more modules on the marketplace, not less. And we want to make it easy for users to install those modules without putting their installations at risk. Modules should be upgrade safe.

With the new marketplace, our goal is to respond to new submissions, within 2 business days. We didn't do a good job on dealing with submissions last year, but that will change now. 

Issues from Trac are not being resolved (they are)

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. 

In the past 6 months, we have closed 100+ trac issues. 94 of the 170 issues on 6.0 are closed. More fixes are yet to be committed to SVN.

Developers have to pay to get extensions listed (Wrong)

Partnership would probably exist if we paid the producer. However, our values are somewhere else and they have never been appreciated.
This is absolutely wrong. Our paid partner program only buys you a listing on the partner page. It doesn't get your extension listed on the marketplace, or get your code into the product. Extensions and Code submissions are reviewed on their own merit, nothing else.

Performance (2 seconds or less)

Our average response time for On Demand service is 2 seconds. We measure it daily because we take it seriously. Vtiger CRM open source has the same code base. We are on a mission to improve the performance to get it under 1 second. I know in some cases, such as Reports, Calendar, response times are unacceptable when you have over very high number of records. We have an On Demand customer for who reports are taking 2 minutes. We are working on addressing this in the product.

Regards,
Sreenivas

On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 1:12 PM, IT-Solutions4You <info at its4you.sk> wrote:

Yes, We agree with all your points. We work with vtiger 8 year (from vtiger 4.x version) and we have the same experiences. Absolutely not boring, just truly.

Dňa 28. 7. 2014 21:43 Pabiszczak, Błażej  wrote / napísal(a):

*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 <http://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

<http://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

<mailto:b.pabiszczak at opensaas.pl>

_______________________________________________

http://www.vtiger.com/

_______________________________________________

http://www.vtiger.com/
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