During a Odoo strategy workshop held the 18th of May 2016 in the centre city of Bruxelles the roadmap for Odoo v10 (will be released until
Odoo Enterprise 2016) has been presented. The meeting has been a very fruitful opportunity to get in touch with the management of Odoo and their latest visions  
on the future of the ecosystem.
 
Xavier Pansaers, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Odoo presented the results gathered through a survey made amongst partners lately, focusing on critical success factors for Odoo projects / partners as well as key figures on the ERP and CRM markets. Key outcomes of his presentation were:
 
1.) There will be an entirely new Odoo training program (will be released 10/2016)
2.) The training program will include lessons learned from prevoius attempts and focus on demonstration, functional as well as configurational skills.
3.) Partners should try to adopt either a lean (customizing only) for really small SME or full stack (development + project management) integration approach (lager SME)
 
Fabien Pinckaers, Chief Executing Officer and Founder of Odoo presented what he named the "New Odoo Methodology". Within his talk he pointed out some critical aspects that according to Odoo's own research and experience are success factors for Odoo projects. These are:
 
1.) Customization only where it is really necessary
2.) Conceive the project manager as the topmost critical role in an ERP/CRM project
3.) Partners are responsible for project success, not customers
4.) Integrating the customer into documentation is a good way to assure that he as duly "tested" the system prior to release
5.) Just integrate 90% of the business, never 100%
 
Finally Antony Lesuisse, Chief Technical Officer at Odoo presented his take on the v10 development of Odoo. Just like a good technician he concentrated on changes and roadmap rather than presentation styling ;-) Key improvements on the way to Odoo v10 according to his presentation are:
 
1.) DB can be installed without english translation (base)
2.) ORM inheritance implementation will be modified to have extentions of a model visible on the childs (base)
3.) Full reconciliation is back (accounting)
4.) Account export changed from xls to xlsx
5.) Timesheets will be managable from project and task (model project_timesheet will be dropped)
6.) Grid view for the timesheets (project, only Enterprise Edition)
7.) Project billing support for sub tasks  
8.) Modules for CAMT.053 CML and csv bank statement imports (only Enterprise Edition)
9.) A new native mobile app (only Enterprise Edition)
10.) Major improvements and overhauling of the MRP features (it is not yet clear how that relates to already existing community code)
 
During the afternoon different workshop sessions were headed by the executives and a fruitful discussion with and amongst partners developed. In his workshop for instance Fabien explained his vision on eCommerce with Odoo and positioned the current status of Odoo in between the flexibility of Shopify and the feature richness of Magento. He is convinced that Odoo today is a good starting point for most serious eCommerce projects and could sort out a lot of interface problems when integrating for instance Magento or Shopware with Odoo.
 
All in all the meeting has been a good opportunity to meet and discuss the Odoo strategy. It has been pointed out once more by the executives that Odoo became a product company rather than a service company during the course of the time. This requires a decent profit from selling added value through Enterprise Service Contracts (ESC) and Enterprise only features for them to suceed. It remains to be seen that a decent profit can be made alongside with well elaborated community management and if the world-wide partner and community base really opts-in on the underyling value propostion of Odoo.