Hello all,
I am planning to develop a connector between ERPNext and Office 365, more particularly SharePoint, in order to benefit from its strong document management capabilities. The idea would be to redirect documents attached in ERPNext to SharePoint and automatically set some metadata, ex.: a plan attached from a Project could be tagged with the project number, status, project type, customer, etc.
Before going ahead with this project, I would like to mesure the interest from the community for such a connector.
I have built a small poll which will help me collect some information, along with some more general statistics about the usage of ERPNext. These statistics may also be helpful to others who are planning to develop around ERPNext. Results will be posted back here.
Thank you in advance for your time.
Link to the poll: Poll - Connector between ERPNext <> Office 365 - SharePoint / General usage statistics
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Thanks to all who filled the poll already.
I invite everybody who has interest in linking a document management solution to ERPNext to participate to this poll.
Thank you
@lefebvre_bern I think an integration with SharePoint would benefit anyone that uses office 365. I would like to make the recommendation to make the connector for CMIS so it can be used with any enterprise ECM. I think it would have a greater potential to being supported my the community in the long term.
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@woakes070048 very good point, and this is what I was aiming for at the beginning, but Microsoft did not activate the CMIS protocol for the hosted version of SharePoint… I know there is a lot of requests from the community for this feature. Microsoft has been working on a new, unified API for all their cloud products (Microsoft Graph Dev Center | APIs and app development), so maybe they concentrate their efforts in this direction.
I also received comments from people about the fact that we should target an open source solution, like Alfresco, but one of my goal is to interact with hosted / cloud solutions. When you deal with the cloud, it really doesn’t matter what runs behind, what matter is the functionality and value you get. Hosted Alfresco is not free, and when you start to compare Office 365 with competing products, it becomes obvious that for 5$ per month for the “basic” plan, which includes email and SharePoint (to name only those), you definitely get a lot of value in my opinion.
Here in north america, Microsoft is in almost every enterprise. Going with Office 365 is the natural path, but this reality is certainly not the same for everybody.
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@lefebvre_bern I was unaware that Microsoft disabled CMIS. I can agree that SharePoint is something that is needed. My business also runs of of office 365. There is an alfresco connector but i believe that it is broken. GitHub - arizem/ERPNext2Alfresco: ERPNext2Alfresco Connector
Hi everybody,
I received a total of 11 answers to this poll. I have enabled access to the results, so here is the link again if you want to consult them: Poll - Connector between ERPNext <> Office 365 - SharePoint / General usage statistics
I would like to thank all who answered, it is much appreciated! The poll is still open, so if you have some spare time and an interest in this subject, please contribute!
So far, the results shows that the majority of documents generated within a company could be linked / are related to a transaction made in ERPNext (45%). Also, everybody agree (100%) that a good document management system would bring value.
The conclusion I draw is that there is a need for a good and robust document management system, either integrated in ERPNext or external to it.
In a world where APIs make interaction between softwares more accessible than ever (and ERPNext is a good example with Shopify, Paypal, DropBox, etc.), I think it only makes sense to extend Frappe’s API to allow interaction with other document management systems.
I have been thinking about this project for some time now, and I would really like to see it come alive!
A colleague of mine recently started a github issue with a basic draft of the project: Feature Idea: File manager API · Issue #2800 · frappe/frappe · GitHub
I have also just posted a bounty with 200$ on it: Bountysource
If I see interest, I will add more.
@rmehta, your team must already be very busy, but if by any chance you have a resource to assign to this project, please let me know. If more funds would help to bump up priority, we can start a private discussion about this.
Of course, any input / contribution are more than welcome.
Thank you!
Bernard
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