ERPNext University?

Community
13

Agree with @Not_a_countant about a lot of ideas and low execution from community. Also @Basawaraj_Savalagi is right when he says that the community needs to do it, since the speed with which erpnext is updating and growing will make any tutorial quite redundant in about 6 months time.

I’ve myself been contemplating about contributing a guide about small shortcuts, steps, etc. but never got to do it. This reminded me about the philosophy behind kaizen - Small improvements everyday.
So if I take out 2 minutes everyday to write about steps I took to achieve a simple task today would eventually lead to a very solid documentation guide. Only if there were some place to quickly note it down and share.

How about starting with a baby step of a wiki based documentation?

There could be 2 major sections -

  1. Implementation and technical - Steps to develop, models, updates related to the doctypes, troubleshooting, related custom scripts, gists, etc.
  2. End User workflow

A hierarchical wikipedia like submission, approval approach can be done. We could always include photos, gifs and videos under those sections too.

For a new user it would be a very structured tutorial including everything to read about and video snippets. This would be a great archive to find everything related to the module section, for everyone else.

5 Likes
14

It is a moving target. Difficult to motivate people to static documentation.

Use a wikiHow? Any wikiHowians on the forum?

15

Very difficult as ERPNext and Frappe moves at a very fast pace.

A feature/module will change the way it works in a blink of an update.

16

I am reviving this because I currently have up to 200 video training sessions in spanish of ERPNext. I will be compiling into video and publishing within two months.

Also, as my company grows I will put in resources to make proper training materials, certifications, etc.

Any progress on this topic so far as of February 2019?

7 Likes
17

++++++1 as student,
I have started a path of a service provider around ERPNext platform (platform includes ERP and many other things) coming from functional background I suffered a lot to jump in the technical side of development world.

I have asked some of the community to give a technical training I got some feedback but prices are very high and I am not sure to get what I want. I spend lot of time reading and googling for minor things.

late 2018 I attended a functional course, trainer connect every day at 6 AM India time (using gotomeeting system) and he gives 1h30 showing a detailed training of current subject, and without practice in parallel, then he share recording on google drive and a test instance where we re-play and do practice. no user manual provided no documents nothing only video recording and they are downloadable.

Overall, since he knows the system very well, usually he start by module configuration or any prerequisite / shared config then he moves to business transactions from end to end.

no issue if it’s paid training with a batch of 20 or more people, cost will be shared among participant and a revenue for foundation or frappe.

I was looking for technical training, like how to install ERPNext, how to customize, how to add validation, how to upgrade, git workflows lot of questions comes to my mind also the case any new comer not a developer initially. The need of training is urgent.

Rgds
Nofal

2 Likes
18

From my point of view, the lack of good, complete, actual and easy to find documentation is the biggest obstacle in expanding the user base and increasing the popularity of ERPnext.

Why people choose ERPnext? There could be several reasons: Because it is good system for them (functionality fulfils their needs). Because they like open source. Because they dont want to pay for the licence. Because they expect it to be do-it-yourself.

How they get know about ERPNext? Probably organic search like “free erp, opensource erp”, maybe they have seen some reviews. There is no marketing visible. But it is OK.

Now lets say they come to ERPnext web pages. They have three choices how to get familiar with ERPnext there. Demo - it will be their first stop, good enough for getting very first general overview. But they want more. Hosting plan - they dont want to make such decision at this time (even if there is a free trial). Self install (or pre-installed VM) - this is what they will try as the next step, if they are at least a little IT-positive. And this step will be crucial for the decision of staying with ERPnext or not. And this is also the step, where they probably get lost. If they will be enthusiastic and persevering, they will come here to the forum. They will ask general questions, because they start from level zero. They will get general answers like you have to search and read, you have to try, you have to experiment… and even if they try their best, if they dont have unlimited amount of time and they are not ultra enthusiastics, they will give it up… Of course, they can hire consultants, but we have to underdstand, that they are still in the presales stage - and they dont want to spend money for uncertain result with consultant from another end of the world.

On the other hand, these people, who have enough knowledges, self-confidence and time to try it, but not enough knowledges to succeed, they are potential new consultants, influencers and “spreaders” of ERPnext among the potential users… If they do succeed. If they will be able to get the knowledges to succeed.

And we are back at the issue with documentation. Good documentation also can make easier life for all the consultants helping users here on the forum. And for projects like ERPNext, the documentation is maybe the most important part of its marketing…

What I wanted to say with all of this? +1 for wiki, +1 for the university.

1 Like
19

Has the group considered using Doxygen to maintain robust documentation that is generated from within the code? I work with another open source software that uses this to maintain their user manual.

20

Found somebody is working in progress for documentation, contribute if possible.

21

My fellow ERPNext’ers:

Many of you believe that Documentation, Training, Education, and Learning are a significant gap in our favorite ERP system. Both functionally and technically.

Why is this difficult to solve? Firstly, there is no clear/obvious owner of the problem. We all see the gap. We all post about it. We all mention ideas. Some people do their own documentation. But there is no Community Solution.

I want to help solve this. I am willing to commit time and effort.

I suggest we form a Working Group to address this problem. The goal? Improve the quantity and quality of ERPNext documentation, knowledge, and education.

I will write an initial Charter (which we can discuss/change). And I will help establish communications. If everyone is agreeable, I am willing to act as a facilitator for the group. This new Working Group will meet regularly to try and solve these education challenges. Everyone is welcome to join and participate. I will suggest that we alternate Meeting Times, to accommodate both sides of the globe.

All communication, meeting notes, and information will be transparent. The Working Group will share progress/success with everyone, especially the ERPNext Foundation.

If our community continues as we have, only posting complaints and ideas on these forums? Nothing will change. But if we form a specific group, with a specific goal? Together, we can make some real progress.

Standby for more communication from me. I will need some time to put this together…

~Brian

6 Likes
22
  1. is this technical or functional content?
  2. let me know once you have translations ready, I’ll look into whether I could help creating some of the videos from it. *)

*) I’d probably not suitable for doing technical (programing) stuff, but if I had a functional script it would definitely be worth a try to transform this into a video tutorial.

Also, just a little general comment on video tutorials … make sure the sound is good!
Many of the tutorials I have seen (frappe youtube channel i.e.) are very hard to watch due to background noises and/or reverb making it very hard to follow the content.

2 Likes
23

Wow… those are some passionate replies to your initial posting @Basawaraj_Savalagi
Even though it was an older topic, it still generates a great deal of interest. Maybe there is a glimmer of hope to get this off the ground in the near future.

I like your idea. And I also think some of the folks here bring up some good points:

@Not_a_countant - I chuckle to myself as read your input to this topic. It sounds very much like myself pulling my hair out in other parts of this forum. And all for good reason. I share your frustration. I think there still may be a path forward though.

@mulyadi_dw - You bring up the most important point in the whole debate. ERPNext is a fast moving target and it is nearly impossible to keep up with the changes from a user perspective, much less a training perspective. This is the main reason our documentation is in a dismal state. It is just not possible to keep up when the target moves so fast.

So… In the past day or so @rmehta published a proposal to make some stable long term version points that could be supported for as much as 4 years in some cases.
Read his thoughts here:

A general comment on versions, design and architecture changes

In his proposal, you will find the possibility to make this training idea come to life again. Once there are stable versions, THAT is the time to develop the training materials. They would be useful then for more than 4 to 6 months. They could be useful for several years.

Once you have that important threshold established, then it makes sense to create a community developed set of training materials.

I even think it might be appropriate for those courses to be sold to new users at a reasonable rate. Once there is a stable working point, it only makes sense for folks to want to learn about how to use it.

Suddenly, you not only have a happy community adding to the knowledge base of a stable version, you have the potential for even the newest of users to be able to adopt the product easily by means of a reasonable priced set of training materials.

It could be a win-win for all involved. Just not quite yet.

However, if you go about the planning stage now, then you might be ready to implement it once the stable versions are implemented.

I like it !!

BKM

1 Like
24

As far as I recollect, there are some notes and references to the ERPNext University in the last Frappe Open Day. I don’t have the link right now but it’s on Frappe.io/blog

I don’t know how much of this is read but it’s good dust for knowing what’s going on there . Nearly 150 pages too

25

I really support this idea. Everything will start with good documentation though. I am a technically savvy person, but I am unable to figure out how to write even simple scripts. I am not a programmer, but am usually able to solve my problems with examples. The problem here is that even the examples of custom scripts are not exhaustive. They leave a lot of gaps.
The functional side of things are a lot better though.

1 Like
26

Scholarships based on contribution to the documentation and source code :slight_smile:?

2 Likes
27

Should the documentation be a prerequisite to setup the University or documentation should be one of the things the University would do?

28

I guess that there is no better time to set up some rules for publishing documentation than now, with changes to Release management that was presented here:

If there will be some regularity and periodicity in issuing new versions, if there will be list of changes/new features of the new version in advance, there should be a good chance to harmonize issuing new/updated documentation with new versions before release date.
And after there will be complete documentation available, next step could be University…

1 Like
29

If there is anything like what’s been discussed so far, I shall join in as an obedient student.

30

However, this idea needs to be publicized a bit before we can get an idea about how much an interest there is. I think there’s quite some demand for something like this, but there’s not much awareness of the existence of this discussion.

31

FYI, below an initiative to consolidate a group for non developer looking for frappe framework training, anyone interested please join discussion.

(Frappe Framework Training for non developer)

1 Like
32

As a newbie, I got an ERP Consultancy job 2 months ago and since then I have been looking for how to know and learn more about ERPNext even be certified. Any means of help will do right justice to me! Best Regards