ERPNext University?

Basawaraj_Savalagi · April 17, 2018, 10:25am

Hi All,

I have had a series of calls with members of the foundation and I have lot more calls lined up.

It is very clear to me that there is a need for technical and functional training.

We do have video tutorials for users and developers but something more structured would definitely help.

So how about ERPNext University?

University will have both functional and technical online courses.

General courses on

Introduction to ERP

Module-specific functional course on

Accounts
Inventory
HR
CRM

Technical courses on

Introduction to Web apps using Frappe framework - for beginners
ERPNext Web app architecture

All course content shall be free and the certifications will be paid.

Online courses and events organised by chapters would help the community members.

Please let me know what is your opinion on this.

Thanks

becht_robert · April 17, 2018, 1:13pm

Hi @Basawaraj_Savalagi,
Good documentation/training seems to be the eternal achilles heel of ErpNext.
I do not have a solution…but just changing the name of the help section in University will not change that.

Basawaraj_Savalagi · April 17, 2018, 1:24pm

Good documentation/training seems to be the eternal achilles heel of ErpNext.

Yes, we have to improve documentation and training resources.

but just changing the name of the help section in University will not change that.

Now that ERPNext is a comprehensive product, having dedicated courses for each module, where experts will share their knowledge will help everyone.

Not_a_countant · April 17, 2018, 1:55pm

Great idea! Love it. The main problem is that I see a bottleneck. There is only 1 you. If we could clone you into 10 more copies then we could do this plus much more

For starters
Instead of trying to build a university how about partnering with schools like codeschool?
Let them take the trouble of making courses etc and then take the responsibility of certification while a few experts guide them?

Look for short term quick win in partnerships and joint ventures.
Longterm going on your own with a University would make sense.

https://www.codeschool.com/

Again, have a clear vision & laser-sharp focus on what you would like to achieve.
The rest, look for strategic partnerships and let others take a lead.

If you wish, I could call a few such schools (on behalf of ERPNext foundation) and see what the reaction is. Perhaps we could offer to give them recognition such as “Official ERPNext courses” or “Recognized by ERPNext Foundation”…And direct interested people to such sites.

becht_robert · April 17, 2018, 7:40pm

Call ETH, always among the top 5 EU universities

Basawaraj_Savalagi · April 18, 2018, 5:29am

No this has to be a done by community members.

No one else would have the experience and insight.

We can take help of professionals for voice over etc, but not for content.

Again, have a clear vision & laser-sharp focus on what you would like to achieve.

I like collaborative approach. Even if I have an idea that is still in early phase, I like to share with the community and discuss.

Not_a_countant · April 18, 2018, 7:57am

So you are saying that these people who are teaching python etc day in and out cant figure out FRAPPE and teach how to write a few apps or extend ERPNext?

Who in this community do you foresee will take this up?

There will be plenty of ideas everyday. Entertaining your own ideas take energy.
And then improving and execution is another story.

I dont understand what you mean by discuss.

Generally it is a one way street. You say something, we say something else. And then you ignore it and do it anyway.

Usually collaboration works better if you are open minded to alternative opinions. That would be collaborative. Not no this has to be done this way…

Good luck.

dufani1 · April 18, 2018, 8:46am

@Basawaraj_Savalagi this will be the best step, I think will earn money more ERPNext itself…

Basawaraj_Savalagi · April 18, 2018, 9:35am

Of course they know Python, they don’t know ERPNext like we know.

Who in this community do you foresee will take this up?

Lots of people. You can do one on analytics

Not_a_countant · April 18, 2018, 9:35am

Someone has been thinking on the same lines.

@Eric_Delisle, Sorry for tagging you. Did you manage to make any more progress? Would be great to know what kind of challenges did you face? Thanks

Not_a_countant · April 18, 2018, 9:39am

I can analyse the past with data. The future is a vision (no data).
If the past is any indicator, trust me nothing will get done. Too many ideas and very little execution
Just my observation.

jai_kejriwal · April 18, 2018, 10:30am

I’m not going to get into semantics but this is a must-have if this community has to grow. My personal choice is to always start small. Off the top of my head,

A short video on making a small improvement to core and generate a pull request would be a great developer oriented screencast.
Another would be to write some test cases to show how to get started with testing in ERPNext.

Both Functional and Technical screencasts have been made by the Frappe team which have been very helpful. I’m more technical leaning because we have two in-house developers who I would like to get to contribute to core and they are both not confident of their ability vis-a-vis contributions.

If professional coaching content sites are willing to do courses on ERPNext, I think that’s great too. At this stage, we should sow the seed to get this started.

LifeP · April 18, 2018, 4:43pm

Agree with @Not_a_countant about a lot of ideas and low execution from community. Also @Basawaraj_Savalagi is right when he says that the community needs to do it, since the speed with which erpnext is updating and growing will make any tutorial quite redundant in about 6 months time.

I’ve myself been contemplating about contributing a guide about small shortcuts, steps, etc. but never got to do it. This reminded me about the philosophy behind kaizen - Small improvements everyday.
So if I take out 2 minutes everyday to write about steps I took to achieve a simple task today would eventually lead to a very solid documentation guide. Only if there were some place to quickly note it down and share.

How about starting with a baby step of a wiki based documentation?

There could be 2 major sections -

Implementation and technical - Steps to develop, models, updates related to the doctypes, troubleshooting, related custom scripts, gists, etc.
End User workflow

A hierarchical wikipedia like submission, approval approach can be done. We could always include photos, gifs and videos under those sections too.

For a new user it would be a very structured tutorial including everything to read about and video snippets. This would be a great archive to find everything related to the module section, for everyone else.

Not_a_countant · April 18, 2018, 7:09pm

It is a moving target. Difficult to motivate people to static documentation.

Use a wikiHow? Any wikiHowians on the forum?

mulyadi_dw · April 20, 2018, 6:17am

Very difficult as ERPNext and Frappe moves at a very fast pace.

A feature/module will change the way it works in a blink of an update.

Tropicalrambler · February 16, 2019, 2:32am

I am reviving this because I currently have up to 200 video training sessions in spanish of ERPNext. I will be compiling into video and publishing within two months.

Also, as my company grows I will put in resources to make proper training materials, certifications, etc.

Any progress on this topic so far as of February 2019?

nmami · February 16, 2019, 11:16am

++++++1 as student,
I have started a path of a service provider around ERPNext platform (platform includes ERP and many other things) coming from functional background I suffered a lot to jump in the technical side of development world.

I have asked some of the community to give a technical training I got some feedback but prices are very high and I am not sure to get what I want. I spend lot of time reading and googling for minor things.

late 2018 I attended a functional course, trainer connect every day at 6 AM India time (using gotomeeting system) and he gives 1h30 showing a detailed training of current subject, and without practice in parallel, then he share recording on google drive and a test instance where we re-play and do practice. no user manual provided no documents nothing only video recording and they are downloadable.

Overall, since he knows the system very well, usually he start by module configuration or any prerequisite / shared config then he moves to business transactions from end to end.

no issue if it’s paid training with a batch of 20 or more people, cost will be shared among participant and a revenue for foundation or frappe.

I was looking for technical training, like how to install ERPNext, how to customize, how to add validation, how to upgrade, git workflows lot of questions comes to my mind also the case any new comer not a developer initially. The need of training is urgent.

Rgds
Nofal

martin42 · February 16, 2019, 1:30pm

From my point of view, the lack of good, complete, actual and easy to find documentation is the biggest obstacle in expanding the user base and increasing the popularity of ERPnext.

Why people choose ERPnext? There could be several reasons: Because it is good system for them (functionality fulfils their needs). Because they like open source. Because they dont want to pay for the licence. Because they expect it to be do-it-yourself.

How they get know about ERPNext? Probably organic search like “free erp, opensource erp”, maybe they have seen some reviews. There is no marketing visible. But it is OK.

Now lets say they come to ERPnext web pages. They have three choices how to get familiar with ERPnext there. Demo - it will be their first stop, good enough for getting very first general overview. But they want more. Hosting plan - they dont want to make such decision at this time (even if there is a free trial). Self install (or pre-installed VM) - this is what they will try as the next step, if they are at least a little IT-positive. And this step will be crucial for the decision of staying with ERPnext or not. And this is also the step, where they probably get lost. If they will be enthusiastic and persevering, they will come here to the forum. They will ask general questions, because they start from level zero. They will get general answers like you have to search and read, you have to try, you have to experiment… and even if they try their best, if they dont have unlimited amount of time and they are not ultra enthusiastics, they will give it up… Of course, they can hire consultants, but we have to underdstand, that they are still in the presales stage - and they dont want to spend money for uncertain result with consultant from another end of the world.

On the other hand, these people, who have enough knowledges, self-confidence and time to try it, but not enough knowledges to succeed, they are potential new consultants, influencers and “spreaders” of ERPnext among the potential users… If they do succeed. If they will be able to get the knowledges to succeed.

And we are back at the issue with documentation. Good documentation also can make easier life for all the consultants helping users here on the forum. And for projects like ERPNext, the documentation is maybe the most important part of its marketing…

What I wanted to say with all of this? +1 for wiki, +1 for the university.

mslake · February 16, 2019, 3:53pm

Has the group considered using Doxygen to maintain robust documentation that is generated from within the code? I work with another open source software that uses this to maintain their user manual.

bagyi111 · February 16, 2019, 4:56pm

Found somebody is working in progress for documentation, contribute if possible.