The best thing about accessing Odoo online is that you can jump in and start using the software right away. You don't have to decide what operating system to use. You don't have to install any software at all. Just enter the URL into your web browser and you are ready to get started.

Another added benefit of taking this approach is, you will verify that your web browser is up-to-date and compatible with the latest version of Odoo. So even if you intend to install Odoo on your own hardware, it is still worth taking a minute to test out the online trial version of Odoo. Expect to put a great deal of time into determining which Odoo applications are right for your company.

Taking a few hours to use the Odoo online version is time well spent and you can put off installing Odoo until you are more certain it is the right software for your business.

Odoo is designed to run on a variety of modern web browsers. Supported browsers include:

Beginning with Odoo 8, Odoo includes native support for mobile phones and tablets. This has been further improved in Odoo 10. Menus are designed to flow and format properly. The new website application even includes a preview within the portal administration to emulate how the site would appear on a mobile phone. While you still suffer many of the limitations that come with a small screen size, the applications are functional and make it even easier for developers to create mobile Odoo applications.

Odoo's mobile application support covers both the Android and Apple iOS platforms. Make sure, however, that for any processes you intend to implement for your business, you test all processes thoroughly for both desktop and any mobile solutions. The smaller screen sizes might make some data unreadable or very awkward to work with.

Accessing the online trial version of Odoo online could not be simpler. Just open up your browser and navigate to https://www.odoo.com/trial.

You will then be prompted to choose one of Odoo's primary business applications as shown in the following screenshot:

Don't worry, you can add more applications later.

Clicking on the appropriate button for the application immediately begins installing your own unique Odoo instance.

For our example, let's go ahead and install the CRM application by clicking on the CRM button:

Next you will be taken to a simple sign up page:

After filling out the form, simply click Start Now. Be patient as it can take thirty seconds or longer for the servers to build the database and bring up the starting page. When the installation is complete, Odoo automatically signs you in so you can begin trying out the software. The goal of this approach is to get users to directly start using the software right away and avoid having to fill out lengthy forms or create logins and passwords to begin using the software.

It really is just one click and you have your own version of Odoo to play with:

The screen now contains the Odoo dashboard for the Enterprise Edition. Please be aware that this will look a lot different to the Community Edition of Odoo even though they are very similar in terms of functionality.

We will discuss the CRM application in detail in Chapter 3, Exploring Customer Relationship Management in Odoo 10.

Take a few minutes to look around in Odoo to get familiar with the interface. You don't have to worry about breaking anything or doing anything wrong. If you run into problems or get confused, just close your web browser and try again.

At the very top of the Odoo application, just under the address bar in the browser, you will see a message that informs you of how much longer your trial version of Odoo will run before you need to register. Also, remember that it is possible to lose this instance of Odoo before the time runs out:

Clicking on the Activate by email link will send an e-mail to the e-mail address that you have filled out with a link to activate your Odoo database. Currently, Odoo lets you use Odoo for free as long as you only install one application.

You can use one Odoo application for free without subscribing. If you wish to install more applications (as you likely will), you must subscribe to Odoo in order to keep using their enterprise cloud hosted version of the software. The first two users of Odoo are free indefinitely.

This means you can sign up and continue using Odoo with just two users without having to pay any monthly fees. For additional users, the current pricing is $25 per month, per user at the time of writing. Each application you use will also incur a monthly cost depending upon the specific application.

Below is the Odoo Online Pricing calculator in December 2016 in the United States:

You can locate the Odoo Online Pricing page at: https://www.odoo.com/pricing-online.

Depending on your requirements, an Odoo subscription might be a good decision. Installing and maintaining an Odoo installation takes a degree of expertise and has risks for production systems. You must maintain adequate disaster recovery procedures in case of server crashes or hard drive failures. There are also complexities in applying bug fixes and migrating to newer versions of Odoo. This book will help you with many of these tasks. Yet, it can be quite convenient to have an Odoo subscription so you can focus on the functional, rather than the technical, aspects of working with Odoo.

If you choose not to pay the subscription fee, do not fear! The remainder of this chapter will assist you with installing Odoo on your own hardware.

Like most ERP systems, Odoo has specific database requirements. In this case, it is PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL is an open source, cross-platform Object Relational Database Management System (ORDMS). While not popular on the scale of Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL, PostgreSQL is an enterprise-class database server with many advanced features. In fact, PostgreSQL stacks up very well against far more expensive databases such as Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle database.

PostgreSQL runs on every major operating system. For most Odoo installations, Ubuntu is the operating system of choice. However, PostgreSQL will also run quite well under other versions of Linux, Microsoft Windows, and even Mac OS X.

You can learn more about PostgreSQL at: http://www.postgresql.org/.

The primary programming language of Odoo is Python. Like the other technologies underlying Odoo, the Python language is open source and runs on all the major contemporary operating systems. It is an extremely popular programming language which makes it very easy to find resources to help you get started.

You can learn more about the Python programming language at: http://python.org/.

Odoo is built upon a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. One of the primary goals of this architecture is to separate the visual display of the information from the business rules and management of the underlying data. For example, if you need to change the way data is organized in the model, it is desirable not to have to make dramatic changes to how you view the data. This is true for maintaining flexibility in viewing data. Today, it is common to have many different client applications sharing the same underlying data.

For the most part, Ubuntu has been the platform of choice for most Odoo installations. However, there are some reasons why you might choose to run Odoo under a Windows installation.

Some of you, after buying this book, might have already jumped ahead and installed Odoo on their Microsoft Windows computer. So, for you go-getters, that working installation of Odoo might function just fine for researching and testing its features. Often the Windows all-in-one installer provides a simple method to get Odoo up and running in a snap on your hardware. Basically, you do not have to install a new operating system.

It is generally accepted that Ubuntu is the recommended operating system for running a production installation of Odoo. There are several reasons why this is true:

Although this book will focus on Windows and Ubuntu installations, you do have several other options. In the past, Odoo has been deployed under a variety of Linux distributions and even the Mac OS. There are also many community members actively developing client frontends for mobile platforms such as Google's Android OS.

The goal of the Odoo development team is to release two stable version upgrades each year. Odoo further labels some stable versions as Long Term Support (LTS) versions. These releases are supported by Odoo for those that have an Odoo Enterprise support contract. For any production environment, it is smart to choose an LTS version. Most importantly, installing an LTS release of Odoo will make bug fixes and patches much easier to implement.

Installing Odoo using the all-in-one package is very simple. After the package has finished downloading, double-click on the exe file to begin the installation wizard.

The first screen will prompt you to select the language for your install.

After you have selected the language and clicked on OK, the wizard will continue with the installation. From here, everything will continue like a normal Windows installation.

During the install, you will be asked to provide information for the PostgreSQL connection.

It is recommended that you change the username and password for security purposes. The default username/password is shown in the preceding screenshot. These values will be written into the Odoo configuration file. The username and password provided will be the administration credentials for the PostgreSQL database, so be sure to remember them.

After the wizard is complete, if you leave Start Odoo checked and then click on Finish, Odoo should open up in your default browser.

If Odoo fails to launch, you can look at the Troubleshooting Odoo Installations section later in this chapter for solutions to some of the problems commonly encountered during installation.

Installing Odoo in Ubuntu is easy when you use the Debian repository. In order to perform these operations you may have to be the root user. If you have an account that has the permissions to do so you can temporarily change to the root user by entering sudo -s.

For better security and to guarantee you are installing the correct package, Odoo now signs their distributions. The following command adds the correct key to your Ubuntu installation so that it will recognize the Odoo package:

wget -O - https://nightly.odoo.com/odoo.key | apt-key add -

Next we want to add the distribution to the /etc/apt/sources.list file with the following command line: echo "deb http://nightly.odoo.com/10.0/nightly/deb/ ./" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/odoo.list. This installs the package.

You can start the installation process by entering these commands into a terminal window:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install odoo
 

The Odoo packages will be first downloaded and then installed. This is an all-in-one installation and should set up all the necessary packages, PostgreSQL, and library dependencies required to run Odoo.

By default the deb installation will place the source in the following directory:

/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/odoo

If you have followed the default installation, then your Odoo installation should be accessing Odoo at http://localhost:8069.

Make sure the URL is exactly as you see it above. If you did change the port number during installation, make sure you change the port in the URL.

If you are unable to pull up Odoo in the browser, it might be good to verify that the Odoo services are running.

Checking for the Odoo services running in Windows

Pull up the task manager and go to the Services tab, then look for odoo-server-10.0. The status should be running, as shown in the following screenshot:

Here is an example of the odoo-server-9.0 service successfully running on Windows.

Additional Odoo troubleshooting steps for Windows can be found at: https://doc.Odoo.com/install/windows/server/complementary_install_information/.

Checking for Odoo services running in Ubuntu

In Ubuntu, you can locate the Odoo services by running the following command in a terminal window:

ps aux | grep Odoo

You will then see the Odoo service listed if it is running:

When managing an Odoo server, one of the most common tasks you will find yourself performing is starting and stopping the Odoo services. Odoo allows you to start and stop the services with a command switch.

To start the services use following commands:

sudo /etc/init.d/odoo start

To stop the services use following commands:

sudo /etc/init.d/odoo stop

Port=[port]  

[ServerAddress]:[port]/web/database/manager 

Admin_password=[your password]