Great to see progress of the Portal Views!!
- There is an old github issue/discussion similar to this around the use-cases for supplier portal access where a manufacturer could directly upload say serial-number lists, advance-shipping-notices, packing-lists in xls form to get those numbers directly imported to the system and thus offload the workload on manual office-work doing things like this over email. Supplier Portal · Issue #2136 · frappe/erpnext · GitHub
_
- Related to above & Security. Normally an ERP would live behind IP-lock or VPN to ensure no zero-day exploits could gamble and potentially make sensitive business-data accessible by the outside world. In our case we could never give suppliers around the world direct acccess to a portal that is the same server-instance as our internal production-data. Have you guys had any thoughts on how we best can solve this?
… I could see light-weight satellite instances (running one VM per key-supplier) that only has the absolut neccesary data to function. i.e. all PO’s for that supplier and it’s relevant meta-data. Supplier could upload to that server-instance while our main erpnext instance would periodically fetch from those installs to avoid any api-access/credentials ever having to be placed physically on the satellite instances.
To allow running these on the minimal, cheapest VM’s offered, I think the full stack with mariadb would usually need more RAM that is in the micro/mini instances. So another idea would be that these portals are super-stripped down, basically just a file-based database/json store that the main-instance could push there to create the pages & views neccessary while the supplier inputted data would be stored as json + raw pdf/.xls that the erp later could fetch and inject as if it would have been coming straight at the existing API’s.
_
- The pagination and webforms reminds me about this one: Handheld UX & Workflows for common tasks · Issue #2116 · frappe/erpnext · GitHub
We struggle daily to offer hand-terminals and pos-like computers that sits in the entrance, warehouse, repair-shop and so on to offer quick and more accurate ways to deal with everyday manual workflows.