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I find the current breakdown of functionality between Community and Professional confusing.  While I understand that Odoo needs to convert users from the community to the professional edition to make money, I find it counterproductive that there is apparently no upgrade path from the community to the professional edition.  It seems to me that the most common scenario would be a company testing out the community edition using their own virtualization hardware and the switching over if they like the product (most likely after some extensive testing, potentially in parallel with an existing platform).

In general, I feel that it is fine to reduce functionality, but completely eliminating it (e.g. mobile platform) seems to make an evaluation once again more difficult if not impossible.

On the pricing side, we do like the licensing option to select by module, but some pricing options don't make sense (e.g. sales [$15] vs time sheets, expenses and vacations [$45]).  Needless to say that it is a hard sell to tell human resources that their modules are more expensive than the ones from the sales department.

Anyhow, we will continue our evaluation and see how things are progressing, but I thought it might be worthwhile to share some feedback I have received from my business partners.

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- Considering Odoo Enterprise is a set of modules that exist on top of Odoo Community, the upgrade path is extremely straightforward: just install the Odoo Enterprise modules you want to start using in your community instance.
If you are talking about an upgrade path from an onpremise instance to an Odoo Online SaaS instance, this is a service Odoo provides. Contact info@odoo.com

- You can evaluate every Enterprise functionality (like the mobile interface) on:
    # demo.odoo.com if you want a 1-click public sandbox to Odoo Enterprise (with limited access to certain settings)
    # runbot.odoo.com if you want a 1-click public sandbox to Odoo Enterprise (with full access to all settings)
    # www.odoo.com/start if you want a private trial instance
I think Odoo is really good at allowing anyone to get into the product as quickly and easily as possible.

- Regarding the pricing remark, I think you are make a generalization of your own usage of Odoo. You could have a company needing CRM and Sales for their sales department activity ($40) and only interested to use expenses for their HR department ($15). Moreover, several companies see the timesheet app as a sales app because they re-bill the time of their consultants/employees to their customers. And finally, even if sales apps are cheaper than HR apps, where is the problem? At the end of the day, it's a matter of value; some companies see more value in sales apps and others in HR apps. It depends on your line of business.

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Thank you for your reply, Fabrice!

Your answer on the upgrade path seems obvious, but there are some resources on the web that seemed to say the opposite.  We didn't find this information clearly stated on Odoo's web page.  And, yes, we would just be looking at upgrading an om-premise installation to Enterprise.

We will also take a look at the cloud offerings to evaluate mobile.  Obviously, the downside of testing it this way is that we wouldn't get a good idea on bandwidth usage.

While I don't disagree with your remarks on pricing, I have to sell value in a new solution to my business partners.  This is obviously a company specific process that might be different for other organizations.  That said, I don't think that we are the only organization bundling licensing as outlined in my original post and so it is more difficult for me to sell the value of a module that is more expensive, but that is perceived as less important from a business point of view.


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Regarding bandwidth usage, you might be interested in the Chrome Developer Tool (Network tab) [CTRL+SHIFT+I] that will give you bandwidth information when testing Odoo Enterprise wherever it is hosted.