[Vtigercrm-developers] Cooperation - part 2

Wed Jul 30 13:45:33 GMT 2014

(Infact, i emailed you a month ago to get your feedback but didn't receive
your reply)

I didn’t reply because you don’t understand any of the following issues:
changing the way of installation, a requirement to attach a credit card or
the business processes. I will list a few examples so you can understand
what I’m writing about:

A.  Who is responsible for the installation of modules in Vtiger software
in your company?

In 95% of all cases it is the company that deploys the software (e.g.
OpenSaaS) and usually different employees are assigned to different
modules. For example: an employee, who knows how to do it best, will do a
module for integration with LDAP. Who will do the task depends strongly on
what needs to be done. That’s how it works in our company.

 There are some cases in which users install modules themselves but it is
very rare. This usually are implementations for small companies from 1 to 5
people.

B. Who will make their credit card available to buy a module?

Neither I, nor an employee will do it. We will not pay with a private
credit card and we do not have access to company’s credit card so who will
buy a module? A customer? Will any customer hand over to us confidential
data of his/her credit card while we are a deployment company that has a
full access to all information?

C. Module installation

Before we install anything on the server of our customer, we first install
it on our testing server, then we upload it to SVN and after that we upload
it on the server of our customer so they can accept it. At the end, we
install it on customer’s production server. How can you imagine a properly
functioning shop in this case?

D. Module coding

Currently, there is no option of coding a module in such a way that it
cannot be decoded. What type of coding will you be using? If the one that
is in PDF Maker, then decoding will take about 5 minutes.

 Secondly, as a deployment company, we often have to modify modules (even
if they were bought at outsourced partners) so how do you imagine a
modification of such an encrypted module?

What is the purpose of such coding? Is it security? Surely, it doesn’t
secure from piracy because one person can decode a module and publish it
but I can assure you that it will cause more harm than good.

 Vtiger isn’t designed for the use at home, but it is a business
application. We often send complete modules to other people or companies
for testing. There are many people on this discussion forum that received
over 100 modules for testing. We don’t have any problems with the
dissemination of our modules.

E. Access to server

Most of large customers have their Internet connection disabled on their
server (in firewall) so they cannot download anything from the shop (and it
will not change!).

 F. Lack of access to CLI

Small customers use hosting, usually without the access to CLI (console).
You can’t even imagine how you‘re making their lives even more difficult by
applying your bizarre elements.

G. Lack of possibility to install from a file

The fact that you planned to remove completely the installation from a file
is an act of sabotage on the community and a sign of business
thoughtlessness (obviously you will benefit from it in short-term
perspective but if you look at it from a long-term perspective, you will
loose loads of customers and partners).

 Obviously, under the pressure, you decided to bring it back (and hide it
from a user), but this only gives us an overall view on where you are
heading with your product.

 We wrote our first opinions (probably on the same day when the information
was published) thinking that it was some kind of a joke and saying that it
is unacceptable. Only when we did put more pressure on you, you decided to
change your attitude, but it all seemed to be imposed.

 Other problems

I could list many more problems and spend a whole night doing it, but my
time is precious and I’m not going to waste it, because it seems that you
have already made up your mind anyway.

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 users

The only thing that you have achieved during all these years is
discouragement. You have discouraged many partners and haven’t published
hundreds of modules. You are loosing partners one by one and the effects of
it are already tremendous

Dedicated team in Vtiger, for resolving trac issues.

Congratulations on that! Finally someone is going to resolve errors, but
how many people will do it in fact? 1? 2? It is not a team for sure, unless
you think that 2 people already form a team.

Focus on improving APIs to allow developers to write powerful extensions

You are concentrating on something you shouldn’t.

Although our company – as one of a few Vtiger providers – integrated Vtiger
with large software systems such as SAP, Dynamics CRM, SAGE, we never ever
used your API. In 99% cases we created our own solutions based on SOAP,
because your solution was able to fulfill only about 10% of our needs and
requirements.

Focus on better Documentation  - New site - community.vtiger.com/help

We appreciate it, but unfortunately, it’s your third attempt to write the
documentation. It still satisfies only 5% of the actual needs of programmers

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.

We understand that you are going to create many modules such as “hello
world” or “world clock” and they will be published within two days, but it
is impossible to do a professional module in two days. It is fiction and
has nothing in common with the reality. If you don’t believe, I can send
you modules, and you can try to publish them in two days.

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.

An average response time of 2 seconds? It might be possible for the cloud
because you have clients for 10 users maximum and your servers are quite
slow. However, it has nothing in common with the reality:

 Add 100 users to your cloud and add 100 records per month to every user
and then do the same for a whole year. Later, try to go to a “Shared
Calendar” tab and you will understand the problem.

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.

I can add 100 new errors in 5 days time. We stopped adding errors to trac.
Now, there are only a few people who still continue doing it. If you have
taken a good care of the community for the past 10 years, then the
situation would be completely different.

 We often asked for software patches and recently we asked for patches to
the Google Sync module, but unfortunately the bugs have not been fixed for
the period of 8 months. So, what is the point of submitting them? I can
understand if it happened once, but we hit the wall each time we require to
change more than one line of code.

Summary

You have done everything you could to discourage us from continuing our
dialogue and from your product.

Z poważaniem / Regards
Błażej Pabiszczak
M: +48.884999123
E: b.pabiszczak at opensaas.pl
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