functional website The Future of Emails Ideas behing the Odoo communication tools. Odoo, email The Future of Emails /website_blog/static/src/img/post1.jpg

Emails are broken.

Emails make me waste my time. But I need them. Given the importance that emails have in our lives, it's incredible it's still one of the only software areas that did not evolve in the past 20 years!

Reading my inbox is the most unproductive task I do on a daily basis. I have to spend one full hour a day to process my emails. All the junk flows in the same inbox; spams, information that doesn't matter, quoted answers of quoted answers, etc. At the end of the hour, only 10 emails actually requested an answer from me. With a good tool, I could have done my job in 10 minutes!

At Odoo, we build tools to bring productivity to enterprises. As emails and information flows are one of the biggest wastes of time in companies, we have to fix this.

To disrupt emails, you need more than just another user interface. We need to rethink the whole communication flow.

The Communication Mechanism of Odoo

Here are the ideas behing the Odoo communication tools:

  • Get Things Done: your inbox is a todo list. You should be able to process (not only read) the inbox and easily mark messages for future actions. Every inbox should be empty after having been processed; no more overload of information.
  • Keep control of what you want to receive or don't want to receive. People should never receive spam. You should follow/unfollow any kind of information in one click.
  • Productivity is key: our smart user interface does not require you to click on every mail to read a thread. Reading a full thread, replying, attaching documents is super fast.
  • A mix of push & pull: Today, people are victims of what others decide to push to them. Odoo differentiates:
    • Messages "for information": you can pull them when you need some specific information; they are not required to be read every day.You receive only what you decided to follow.This accounts for 90% of your daily emails.Use the "Inbox" menu for these.
    • Messages "for action": they require your immediate attention and you need to process them all. This accounts for 10% of your daily emails. Use the "To: me" menu for these.
  • Focus on the Content: Everything is stripped to emphasize on the real message. No more welcome introductions, greetings, signatures and legal notes.We standardize the layout of each message. (signatures are on the profile of a contact, not in every message)
  • Folders and mailing lists are great tools but too complex in traditional email clients. In Odoo, a group of contacts that share a discussion can be created with one click. Every group should have it's own email address.
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New Features Launched

To add to an already comprehensive set of Odoo features, a website content management system (CMS or WMS) has been developed and a beta release is available from today, 31st January 2014.

Odoo claims to be 'the Open Source software that makes building your company's website and selling your products online easy'. So how true is this statement?

"Odoo's latest launch will allow a business to go from zero to trading online quicker than ever before,” Stuart Mackintosh, MD of Open Source specialist and Odoo integration partner, OpusVL, explains. “The investment required to have a fully automated business system is dramatically reduced, enabling the small and medium enterprise to compete at a level of functionality and performance previously reserved for the big IT investors."

"Finally, the leading edge is being brought to the masses. It will now be the turn of the big players to catch up to the superior technologies of the SME."

"This is another clever and highly disruptive move by Odoo,which will force other technology providers to take another look at the value they are providing to ensure that their 'solutions' can still compete."

"Odoo now competes on many fronts, with no real competition out there to knock them off the top spot. With the launch of their integrated CMS and Ecommerce systems,it only elevates their position as one of the leading lights in the open source revolution. It will be at least 5 years before another ERP or CMS provider will be able to compete at this level due to the technology currently employed by most industry providers."

Adding to industry leading technology

Like many modern website editors, with Odoo you can edit content in-line, enabling you to see exactly what you are changing and ensure your changes suit the context.

However, unlike other web content management systems, it fully integrates into the back-end database. This means that when you edit a product description, image or price, it updates the product database in real time, providing a true self-service window into the business.

This provides a single source of data for your company and removes the need to create offline synchronisation between website and product database.

As it comes, there is a default website based on Bootstrap 3, the latest industry standard for rapid development of multi-device websites backed by Twitter, so can be directly integrated with many web tools and works across all devices by default.

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