Odoo 8: Release Notes

New apps, improvements, new features and much more

Odoo 8 is moving into new territories, beyond ERP. This release includes a disruptive website builder, an integrated eCommerce, an iPad/Android based Point-of-Sale and a Business Intelligence engine and several awesome inbound marketing apps. No other product allows such a level of integration out-of-the-box. That's why we renamed OpenERP into Odoo for version 8. There is no comparison anymore with traditional ERP products.

Key improvements of version 8 include, by order of priority:

  • Usability & productivity improvements: Odoo 8 is faster, easier to use and configure
  • Improvement of existing apps: 732 tasks covering most applications
  • New website builder and CMS
  • New apps: Point of sales with full hardware support, marketing apps, a new WMS and a CMS,
  • The frontend to every app: online jobs offers, booking of events, quotation builder and electronic signature, etc.
  • Technical improvements: refactoring of the framework (new API)
  • Removed modules / features

This new version is the result of 1432 tasks and 12.500 man*days of development during 18 months. A huge effort has been done on the cleaning of the existing code base, resulting in only 17k lines of python code added for all these new features.

Usability and productivity improvements 

Faster user interface

  • Writing in the search box is now super fast, you don't need to wait that Odoo preloads matching records (but auto-completion is still available through criteria expansion)
  • "Group by" reports are much faster, performing all grouping in one query instead of one per group
  • The navigation bar (search, breadcrumb) and menu use fixed positioning. You don't need to scroll anymore to search or navigate.

Improved search view

  • Searching on relation fields allows to search on a string instead of selecting a specific record
  • Default filters of every menu have been reviewed to better fit best practices and most common needs
  • Custom filters are now stored per-menu instead of per-document type (e.g. different filters can be saved for Suppliers and Customers menu)
  • Advanced search options appears on top of the results and is open by default on the reporting screen

User interface

  • Unified menu bar allows you to switch easily between the frontend (website) and backend
  • Some part of the design (modal dialogs, top menu) have been ported to bootstrap CSS
  • Buttons in forms have been redesigned
  • Smart buttons can now provide statistics on related documents (number of Sales Orders for a customer, etc.)
  • Cleaner design
  • Dropdown to easily change the status (red/green bullet) of tasks, leads, issues
  • Improved the quick add dialog on many2one fields

Database manager

  • Support for combined backups containing both the database dump and the document file store (for backup and restore)

Form views

  • New field type: domain selection field

Graph views

Improvements  of existing apps

Generic improvement

  • "State" and "stage" concepts merged on all objects (leads, tasks, issues, ...)

Products

  • Efficient multi-level variants:
    • variants, MRP characteristics and attributes have been merged in a single concept

Recruitment

  • Recruit and manage highly skilled talents
  • Manage documents (resumes and motivation letters) directly from the recruitment menu
  • New dashboard (kanban view) to manage job positions
  • Publish job offers and apply from the website

Improved Leave Requests

  • You cannot create leave request in a draft if there are not enough leaves. When confirming new leave requests, other leave requests waiting for validation are now taken into account in order to display the remaining leaves, helping employees avoid mistakes. HR Officers are also able to re-edit existing leave requests much more easily.

Document management

  • Grid view to display all files and search easily
  • Preview of images

Mails

Calendar

Project 

  • Link a stage to a template to send email automatically to the customer when the case reach the stage
  • Convert a lead to issue (new module crm_project_issue)

Accounting

New Purchase workflow

  • Draft PO state split in two states: Draft Purchase Order and Request for Quotation
  • Auto-merge of multiple products for the same suppliers when the PO is in draft state
  • Choose the currency directly on Purchase Orders
  • New call for tenders application

Sales / contract

  • Sales team management: CRM Sales Teams are now displayed only if you need them, there is a new option to toggle them in the Sales Settings menu ("Use Sales Teams" option in Settings/Configuration/Sales). When enabled, a new Sales Team menu will appear in your Sales menu, giving you a central dashboard with a quick overview of all Leads, Opportunities, Quotations, Invoices and the monthly turnover, by Sales Team.
  • Get statistics
  • Follow invoicing status
  • Default terms and conditions defined on company
  • Recurring invoice on contract 

Manufacturing

  • Color code to know status of reserved products
  • Bom management based on variant and template

Improved Google Doc integration

  • The new Google Spreadsheet module allows one-click creation of report spreadsheets, providing dedicated formulas to grab live data from your Odoo system and construct any kind of custom reportings.

Point of sales

Customization features

  • Automated actions and Server Actions revamped, with a drastically improved and simplified user interface.

CRM

New Website Builder and CMS

Version 8 includes a new Website Builder and CMS allowing you to create awesome websites in a few clicks.

Features

  • No administration interface, edit everything inline (main contents, menus, footers, ...)
  • Use building blocks to insert and edit advanced contents (banners, pricing pages, etc) 
  • Discover dynamic widgets of CMS 
  • Smart multi-language support: change in a master page are applied on translated ones
  • Automated translation by professional through the Gengo integration (or free using a machine translation)
  • Media manager (fonts/icons, images, videos)
  • Support for multiple themes (only one by default: bootstrap)
  • Fully integrated with the backend

Super fast: beats all open source CMS at Google Page Speed

  • CMS performance optimization
  • Minified and compressed JS, HTML, CSS
  • Only one file to load all javascripts and one other to load all CSS ressources, whatever the modules installed (using bundles)
  • Cache optimizations
  • Image re-compression
  • Extra module: website_instant to preload pages even before the user clicks on it (hover). Clicking on a link is instantaneous with this module

Marketing optimized

  • Great SEO optimization tool
  • Clean Google analytics integration
  • Google micro-data support by default
  • Advanced call-to-actions: mailing-list subscriptions, contact forms, newsletter subscription, etc
  • Community builder tools: forum, Q&A
  • Clean sitemap (with sitemap indexes for huge websites)
  • Clean titles and keywords with support for page/product renaming (with 301 redirects)
  • Social network integration

Enterprise-ready, includes most features required by professionals out-of-the-box

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New Apps

Mass mailing (an alternative to survey monkey)

  • Design emails using building blocks and inline edition
  • Create segment in just a few clicks on any object (customers, contracts, leads)
  • Manage mailing lists (newsletter)
  • Easily import a list of contacts
  • Optional campaings to manage your mass mailing flows:
  • Kanban view with customized stages
  • A/B testing feature
  • statistics per campains: open rates, click rates, delivery rates, opt-out, unsubscribe...

Business Intelligence on every document

  • Multi-dimensional Pivot tables
  • New graph views
  • Slide, dice, drill-up, drill-down, advanced search and drill-across
  • Speed improvements when compute on a lot of data

Quotation Builder 

Warehouse Management System rewritten from scratch

  • New WMS system
  • Dedicated user interface for barcode scanners
  • Full multi-company, multi-warehouse support
  • Advanced routes
    • Put away strategies: to store products at the right location
    • New removal strategies: fifo, lifo, nearest
    • Push and pull rules supporting new types of operation out-of-the-box
  • Configurable operation types:
    • Delivery orders, internal movements,
    • Cross-docking, drop-shipping, quality control, etc
  • Better cost management:
    • Multi-company costing
    • Several costing methods: fifo, lifo, average price, etc
  • Improved reports
  • Better physical inventory toom: by products, by location, by partners
  • Better lots management
  • Landed costs support
  • Improved packing interface supporting boxes, palets, etc
  • Picking waves support
  • Scale on high volume of transactions

Enterprise social network 

The front-end of every application

Based on the website builder, Odoo version 8 includes the frontend of every Odoo application. All Odoo applications became better thanks to their frontend features. Few examples: event management (you can promote and sell events online), recruitment (applicants can apply online), sales (you can publish your store with the eCommerce), lead acquisition is improved with contact form, survey can now be public and many other useful features:

Odoo eCommerce - discover new features 

How to create awesome websites with Odoo

  • Advanced upselling / cross-selling features:
    • suggested products, options, accessories
    • on product page, on cart, when adding to cart
  • Product configurator:
    • Required attributes and optional attributes
    • Support attributes: colors, selection box, bullet points, 
  • Product catalog management:
    • ribbons, order and size of products, list or grid view
    • navigation: multi-level hyerarchies, search, filter on attributes (colors, sizes, ...)
  • Configurable purchase process:
    • taxes, deliveries, multiple addresses (shipping/invoicing)
    • multiple product types: services, physical products, events, downloadable products
    • no registration required (post-purchase registration allowed to track order/delivery)
  • Full integratation:
    • multiple pricelists according to the user
    • inventory management, delivery methods, products, VAT according to countries
    • discount codes based on pricelists
    • multiple pricelists based on locations (Europe in EUR, U.S. in USD

Blog (a clone of Medium)

  • Clean blog design and building blocks
  • Commenting system in the bottom or inline
  • Select text to tweet
  • Integrate call-to-actions with a simple drag&drop of building blocks

Forum / Q&A (a clone of stackoverflow, test it yourself

  • Integrated gamification mechanisms: karma, badges, rights linked to contributions
  • Multiple forums, badges, tags, users
  • Integration with social media

Reviewed survey app

Job position

Events 

  • Publish and promote events
  • Sell online: multiple tickets
  • New event management features:
    • tracks, agenda, propose a talk, sponsors, locations, online events
  • Manage simple or advanced events having a full sub-website dedicated to the event

Twitter integration

  • New building block: show favorite tweets inside any page

Quotation builder

New reports

  • Reports in all apps have been redesigned using the new CMS engine (qweb)
  • Reports print much faster and feature full style control (HTML + CSS)
  • Reports can be printed in PDF or HTML output
  • Customization of reports is possible using the inline edition of the Website Builder

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Technical improvements

From V7 to V8: The New API

New framework, backward compatible:

  • More pythonic active records
  • Easier definition of objects and fields
  • On_change, function fields and defaults merged in a single concept
  • Easy triggering of signals for workflows
  • Better cache handling and transient models
  • Support for display_name, a better name_get alternative

Few modules have been ported to this new API: events, base and accounting. On average, the code is reduced by 20% when porting to the new API.

Backward compatibility will be removed in version 9. All future modules must be developed using the new API.

Removed modules / features

  • Default dashboards per application (only "My Dashboard" is kept)
  • Process view: obsolete and unmaintained feature
  • Project_long_term: Project Phases can be added as customisation, other features were experimental/unstable
  • Document_webdav and Document_ftp: the features were unstable and attachments are managed from the openchatter
  • Audit_trail: track history of documents in chatter
  • Outlook and thunderbird plugins: not supported anymore, experimental features - other email integration methods recommended (fetchmail, mail gateway, etc.).

Try Odoo 8 now:

.odoo.com

Odoo 8 is here!
When simplicity meets comprehensive features