For our December “Community Choice” Project of the Month, the community elected Dolibarr ERP – CRM, an open source ERP and CRM web software for business.
Dolibarr is easy to use and is full-featured, offering products management, invoices management, orders management, point of sale and so much more.
Recently we caught up with the lead developer Laurent Destailleur as he shared some thoughts about the project’s history, purpose, and direction.
SourceForge (SF): Tell me about the Dolibarr ERP – CRM project please.
Laurent Destailleur (LD): Dolibarr ERP CRM is a web modular business suite. Each module (also called applications) can cover a feature. For example, there is one module for the billing, one for the expense report, one for the stock management, the accountancy, the commercial proposal, the agenda, the recruitment, the lead or project management, etc… There are a hundred modules provided with the core. And if this is not enough, there are also 600 external addons and complementary applications developed by a lot of different companies on the market place (www.dolistore.com).
SF: What made you start this?
LD: I was looking for an easy to use software to manage my freelancer activity in December 2003 (making billing and following customers), as an Open Source fan (I am also the author of AWStats Log Analyzer, started several years ago and that would become project of the month 7 months later in 2004 :-).
At this date, there was not a lot of choice. I finally found Dolibarr ERP CRM on what was a very small software in PHP started by Rodolphe Quiedeville in April 2002 for the same need. I started to enhance it. Rodolphe asked me in 2008 to take the lead of the project.
SF: Has the original vision been achieved?
LD: I think so. The goal was to offer a software that was most easy to use with a good learning curve. Finally Dolibarr has become as feature-filled as the most powerful ERP and CRM but being immediately usable after installation, and very easy to use.
SF: Who can benefit the most from your project?
LD: All companies need an ERP and a CRM. And because Dolibarr is available in all languages, every company in the world (from the freelancer to the large company) can benefit from Dolibarr ERP CRM. But because Dolibarr is free (if you can host it yourself), it is often the small and medium companies that use it. Dolibarr is also very popular among the freelancers and the foundations.
SF: What core need does Dolibarr ERP – CRM fulfill?
LD: All the need a company has, we try to cover it with one module, so integration between each module/application is done automatically with no need of setup or developing interfaces.
SF: What’s the best way to get the most out of using Dolibarr ERP – CRM?
LD: A good way to start is to enable only one or two modules you firstly need. Once you are familiar, you can enable another module so Dolibarr can follow your needs when your needs increase.
SF: What has your project team done to help build and nurture your community?
LD: A foundation was created and the foundation has installed a wiki for documentation, manages social networks, develops tutorial videos, installed tool to manage members (Dolibarr of course), maintain the web site portal https://www.dolibarr.org (built with Dolibarr CMS always), etc… The foundation has also started to work on free online courses. Some DevCamps are also organized every 6 months. The foundation also manages a list of qualified partners: https://partners.dolibarr.org and a list of SaaS providers of the solution: https://saas.dolibarr.org
SF: Have you found that more frequent releases helps build up your community of users?
LD: For 12 years now, there is a new major version every 6 months. I don’t think having more or less releases can help to build a community. What is important is that each release is better than the previous one and that each user using an old version can upgrade, with no effort, to the new version. So you always keep old users, getting also new ones. This increases your community of users. But the most important is to have a product that provides the features the users need. And Open source is a good solution for this, since a lot of contributors are users themselves.
SF: What was the first big thing that happened for your project?
LD: Moving the project from SVN to GIT was a very interesting work. After this change, international contributions to the project just exploded.
SF: What helped make that happen?
LD: One of the core developers asked it, I just validated, to follow the progress. Result was better than expected.
SF: How has SourceForge and its tools helped your project reach that success?
LD: When we decided to move to GIT, GIT was not yet available on SourceForge (it appeared a few months after), so we installed our own forge for the sources on a server of the foundation (note: we moved sources to GitHub a few years later). Some developers (like myself) still sign their contributions with the SourceForge email alias. Also, the SourceForge file download platforms is our official mirroring service to download the application.
SF: What is the next big thing for Dolibarr ERP – CRM?
LD: We currently have enough features to be competitive with the most important ERP and CRM of the market (Even if some important features are still coming soon…). But we are missing a “nice trademark”.
Having the best software is not enough. Users often make the choice of the most sexy one, even if this is not a good choice for the long term. So we must also become more and more sexy.
SF: How long do you think that will take?
LD: This is a long term action. Each version will be better.
SF: Do you have the resources you need to make that happen?
LD: Yes. The Dolibarr community is very large now. In fact, we have too many contributions. I never thought I would say this one day. But the fact is that a software so feature-filled like Dolibarr needs to introduce features with a lot of care to avoid losing the initial philosophy “Being simple for everybody: The developer, the Installer and the End user”. So more and more contributions must be discarded because they bring interesting features, but the ratio of feature/ease of understanding is not good. For this reason, we encourage developing uncommon features as external addons.
SF: If you had to do it over again, what would you do differently for Dolibarr ERP – CRM?
LD: Maybe moving to GIT earlier.
SF: Is there anything else we should know?
LD: Maybe my third project of the month will be sell-your-saas: https://sellyoursaas.org (very new and not yet on SourceForge). See you in 16 years 😉
So happy to see Dolibarr still alive even if I’ve never doubt. Dolibarr is for me a real free software as it is maintained by real community contributors !
Use Ful For Me:)