Communications Tools

Open ERP provides all the information you need to pursue your company’s business opportunities effectively. But to stay productive with all the information you have to handle it’s essential that you can keep using your normal communications tools by interfacing them with Open ERP, and not be limited just to Open ERP’s interface.

Open ERP can do most things you need to pursue your business opportunities. But there can be quite a quite a bit to learn, which reduces your efficiency while you’re learning. And if that’s true for a heavy user of the system, it’s doubly true for an occasional user or someone who already makes heavy use of standard Office applications and can’t easily change.

So for those who need to continue using their traditional Office applications to maintain their efficiency, Open ERP can be fitted out with interface adapters to some of the most common. Your users can participate in many Open ERP-maintained processes without ever leaving their familiar Office-based environment, and can avoid double data-entry yet link into Open ERP’s database automatically.

The three following modules are described:

• Mozilla Thunderbird interface,
• Microsoft Outlook interface,
• Microsoft Word interface.

These three modules were developed by the Axelor company (http://axelor.com/ , located in Paris). Thunderbird available through the official Open ERP site (http://www.openerp.com/download/modules/5.0/).

The chapter is a mix of installation and configuration instructions, and basic interaction exercises.

For this chapter you should start with a fresh database that includes demo data, with sale and its dependencies installed and no particular chart of accounts configured.

You will also need to have administrator access to your Windows PC to install the Outlook and Word interface adapters described in the chapter.

• Microsoft Outlook interface
  • Installing the Outlook plugin
  • Using the Outlook plugin
• Mozilla Thunderbird interface
  • Installing the Thunderbird extension
  • Thunderbird user interface
• Microsoft Word interface
  • Installing the Word plugin
  • Using the Word interface