3rd party apps guidelines for Sales - odoo-ps/pshk-process GitHub Wiki

When it comes to 3rd party apps, the first reflex should be to challenge the client on the business needs the app covers. Some tips to challenge and have a better overview of the need covered by the app:

  • Why is this 3rd party app necessary in your daily operations?
  • How much time do you spend or would you spend doing this with a work-around?
  • If 3rd party is an integration: How many orders / operations does this integration cover for?
  • If we are not hosting the repository, we’ll not do any developments for you
  • Odoo.sh is mandatory to work with 3rd party applications

If we can avoid integrating a 3rd party app, we’ll do everything we can to do so. We have no control over what’s happening in 3rd party apps in general and if we need to integrate one, we’ll do a code review and then apply the maintenance over this app. In real life, it’s generally way easier for us to understand the business needs and do the development ourselves. This way, we’ll count only the Lines of Code really necessary for the customer, reducing the cost in the long term.

What’s the process if your customer mentions a 3rd party app during the qualification or if you found something that could fit your client’s need:

If this is NOT an integration:

  • Qualify the customer’s needs fully
  • Understand the business need the 3rd party app covers
  • Challenge the customer on why does s.he need this
  • If you don’t find a good work-around, create a pre-sales linking the 3rd party app to have a second opinion on this from a FC. Please explain the business need in details so we’re sure what to cover in the next steps
  • FC and TC will then decide if it’s better for the customer to go for the 3rd party app or if it’s better to do a dev/custo from scratch

If this is an integration:

  • Qualify the need this integration covers
  • Challenge the customer regarding the volume of operations this integration covers for. e.g. it doesn’t make sense to have an integration to cover a few operations/day. Note that most systems provide an export function and you can import any record in Odoo
  • Note: as integrations are generally quite big in terms of LoC, the customer might not want to pay for the maintenance of it. You need to define with your customer if this is something they’re ready to pay maintenance for (and don’t hesitate to use this cost to challenge the need)
    • If they’re ready to pay for maintenance:
      • Need to sell a GAP Analysis for this. We’ll check the integration during the GAP Analysis and make sure this is something we can upgrade in the future. We’ll also probably need to re-write some of the code so the GAP Analysis will provide an estimation if the time required to completely integrate the app
    • If they don’t want to pay for maintenance:
      • We will not be able to have the customer under our repository on SH. This implies:
      • We’ll not do any development for them,
      • We will not upgrade their module when the customer wants to change version
      • We’re not taking responsibility for the eventual issues they could have with this integration
    • The external partner will have to implement this integration and train the user on this.
    • Training of the user can be more complex on our side as we don’t have the full information and ownership and what happened on the database.

TLDR;

3rdpartydocgithub