Duration: 17:23
PART 1 — Analytical Summary 🚀
Title: Making Odoo work for your business: When and how to change standard logic?
Speaker: Anna Zurabashvili, Client Solution Developer, Professional Services Tech team at Odoo
Event: OXP (Odoo Experience), developer-focused session
💼 Context
Anna addresses developers and technical consultants who adapt Odoo to business needs and live with the consequences of those changes. The talk is not a product announcement; it’s a pragmatic guide to deciding when and how to alter standard logic—and when not to. Her central metaphor is the Jenga analogy: small-looking changes can destabilize an entire system if they touch foundational blocks.
🧠 Core ideas & innovations
The session frames customization as a game of balance. You may intend to “just tweak a field,” but that field could be load-bearing for dozens of flows. Anna’s prime example is the sensitive area of multi-company setups. In standard Odoo, a customer record’s company_id is a Many2one pointing to one company; if empty, it’s shared across all companies. A common business request is to share certain customers with several (but not all) companies. The naïve approach—changing company_id from Many2one to Many2many—looks innocent but effectively pulls a block from the bottom of the tower. The result in their attempt: broken reports, accounting issues, vanished chatter, and in some cases Odoo wouldn’t even start.
From this, Anna outlines a disciplined approach. First, analyze functionally with business analysts to uncover the real need—sometimes the requested change isn’t actually needed or can be achieved through existing features or process adjustments. Second, analyze technically with a “stay close to standard” mindset; reuse standard modules and flows that are proven and extensively tested. Third, think for the future: before, during, and after development, document intent, consider upgrades, and write tests. Tests are “seat belts”—use standard tests and user-level scenarios to guard against regressions. She also flags “known-hard” domains (like multi-company) where the safest path is often to avoid altering core primitives.
Anna shares another cautionary tale from Subscriptions: the subscription state depends on date logic. Changing the date rules altered states in unintended ways, effectively going against the standard contract of the module and causing cascading issues. The moral is consistent—touching core assumptions, even for a seemingly small business need, can have wide-ranging effects.
⚙️ Impact & takeaways
This talk equips teams to reduce risk and upgrade pain by resisting deep structural changes, especially to base fields and models. It promotes a culture of analysis over reflexive coding, collaborative scoping with analysts, and rigorous testing. In Q&A, Anna reinforced practical guardrails: avoid promising “quick wins” without design, choose between Odoo Studio, automation rules, and custom modules based on the actual need, and accept that there’s no substitute for testing. For legacy “tall Jenga towers” on old versions, the only sustainable path is to re-align closer to standard to tame complexity over time. 💬
PART 2 — Viewpoint: Odoo Perspective
Disclaimer: AI-generated creative perspective inspired by Odoo's vision.
Our job is to make business software feel simple, but simplicity is fragile when the fundamentals are bent. The cleanest implementations are those that leverage the standard, because that’s where integration, performance, and upgrades compound. When you change a load-bearing field, you don’t just change a screen—you change how the whole system thinks.
The community’s strength lies in challenging requirements early, sharing proven patterns, and building on a reliable core. Tests, documentation, and restraint aren’t constraints; they’re how we keep Odoo fast to implement and easy to evolve. If we keep the core clean, everyone—customers, partners, and contributors—moves faster together.
PART 3 — Viewpoint: Competitors (SAP / Microsoft / Others)
Disclaimer: AI-generated fictional commentary. Not an official corporate statement.
The “Jenga” metaphor is spot-on and aligns with the “clean core” principle we advocate as well. Deep changes to foundational objects risk compliance, auditability, and upgrade paths—especially in multi-company scenarios with stringent segregation of duties. Odoo’s guidance to stay close to standard and to lean on tests is sensible for scalability and lifecycle management.
The challenge for Odoo at larger enterprise scale is formalizing extension points and guardrails so customizations remain compliant, performant, and maintainable. Enterprise customers expect strong guarantees around data isolation, cross-entity governance, and industry-specific controls. Odoo’s UX and speed are differentiators; the opportunity is to systematize safe customization patterns that keep that UX advantage without compromising enterprise depth.
PART 4 — Blog Footer Disclaimer
Disclaimer: This article contains AI-generated summaries and fictionalized commentaries for illustrative purposes. Viewpoints labeled as "Odoo Perspective" or "Competitors" are simulated and do not represent any real statements or positions. All product names and trademarks belong to their respective owners.