Surprise, It's ChatGPT! - Roadmap Odoo 17

Pierre: 0:01

As a product owner, I think what's very important is to find the right balance having a tool that's very easy to use for non-initiated people.

Juliette: 0:13

We cannot talk about navigation without mentioning as well the mobile version. People want to shop faster. They want to get products delivered to them in one click from their couch. So we redesign actually the checkout form of e-commerce, and we put the emphasis on the mobile. So the experience is really like faster, smoother...

Pierre: 0:32

We intend to review basically all the apps that have an online presence. There are a few objectives. First is of course make them very nice, customisable to some extent and also to be consistent.

Olivier: 0:45

Hey there, Odooers. In this digital age, a strong online presence is no longer a luxury. It's a necessity. I'm your host, Olivier, and today we are lifting the curtain slightly to showcase what's coming your way in Odoo 17th website and e-commerce. Our product owners, Juliette Palau and Pierre Delacroix, join us today, ready to share a sneak peek of the exciting new features in store. Eager to know more about it? Let's dive in. Hi, Juliette.

Juliette: 1:10

Hi.

Olivier: 1:11

Hi, Pierre.

Pierre: 1:11

Hello, Olivier.

Olivier: 1:12

Today is a special episode. It's a three headed episode. We're going to talk about website and e-commerce. So actually, you're both there because you are. It's both your scope. So website for Pierre and e-commerce for Juliette. So could you tell us when you're developing something like that, when your team is developing something like that, what the focus is? Because we don't, we don't know. I mean, you have to work on a new version of Odoo. Like one year ago, you started to work on this one. How do you decide what to do?

Pierre: 1:41

Yes. So as a product owner, I think what's very important is to find the right enabling as many possibilities, as many features as possible, but also having a tool that's very easy to use for non-initiated people. And so typically for me as a website, as a product owner of Website, it's to allow people that never done any website to be able to create one very easily with beautiful pages, but also allow more experts, like a designer to find some more advanced features like maybe animation, scroll animation, and this kind of stuff. So...

Olivier: 2:21

Are those that important today when you build a website? So would you say that a website not doing animations and having something like a bit more old fashioned will be less attractive to people? Would people feel the effect of that?

Pierre: 2:34

A good question. So I think what's really important for Odoo is to allow both. So maybe most websites don't have animation and it's very good. So maybe we don't put animations for you if you don't ask for. But we also want people that want animation to be able to do it as long as the UI remains clean. And so that's always what we try to, as I said, try to optimize. But for the answer is. Yes and no. It depends, but probably most websites don't have and it's fine.

Olivier: 3:04

So it depends maybe on your business also, or...

Pierre: 3:07

Or it can be or your business, but also you might have animations that you don't like a slight overlay or dark.

Olivier: 3:18

Yeah, when your mouse is on it, the color changes or something.

Pierre: 3:20

So that you can maybe have on all websites if you're even if you have a bank or So and that's a new feature we developed this year. So so yeah, there are animations and animations, you know.

Olivier: 3:32

And how do you I mean, I guess it's important to have something that people can And this kind of, of, of well builders to say the word we give the name, we give it into Odoo to create a website really from scratch. I guess it must always be a trade off between allowing doing things and putting parameters everywhere and having something that you can just, uh, you know, you click three buttons and you have a decent page. How do you handle that?

Pierre: 4:02

But again, we want to provide both. So last year we added the website configurator where uh, in just a few four steps, few questions. Very in two minutes. You have already like a home page and a theme with your colors and you know, this kind of stuff.

Olivier: 4:17

Could you explain in more details how it works? So for someone who never used it.

Pierre: 4:21

Yes.

Olivier: 4:21

What what happens?

Pierre: 4:22

So okay, if you start a trial with Odoo and you select the website as So we have show relevant pictures on your first website. Uh, what are your colors. And you can even upload your logo if you have one. So we detect the colors from the logo and then we ask what kind of pages do you want. Do you want the privacy policy page? Do you want the pricing page. Or maybe about us. And so it's very easy very fast for questions. And we we give you three proposition of of theme. And the users can choose and then boom you have your website that's already built. And then...

Olivier: 4:59

It's a matter of creating a placeholder for, for for the user to better

Pierre: 5:05

Yeah, exactly. So if you're if you just want a very, uh, vitrine, very easy, uh, it's done. And if you are a designer, then, you know, you can start from scratch from a blank page and you can add the blocks that you need and stuff like that.

Olivier: 5:23

And are there things that you on, so on this version of Odoo, are there things which you change your mind and you went in a totally different direction or.

Pierre: 5:37

Yeah, there is a one big new feature that I really am really excited about. It's when you create a new page now, you will be able to choose among templates with categories like for example, category can be pricing, it can be a gallery, it can be the team. And then for each category we suggest you a lot of templates with already building blocks pre-arranged for you. So you even if you have never created a website and you don't really know what you want, this will help you to see suggestion of of page layout. So this is very cool.

Olivier: 6:11

The idea being again to configure it more quickly and have something. Yeah, well not starting from a blank page.

Pierre: 6:17

Exactly. Exactly that.

Olivier: 6:19

Okay. Uh, on the ecommerce side now, maybe a little more. Uh, are there things that you well, what are the the the the priorities that you had in mind when working on, on on this version? What is important when you're doing an e-commerce or improving an existing e-commerce tool? Yeah, like you did this year.

Juliette: 6:37

So yeah, what we really want to, uh, to do this year was to provide more So, for example, we worked on the e-commerce description. It was already possible to set the description and products, but first of all, it would be shared between the back end and the front end. So of course you don't want to have like massive description on your back end, but also in the formatting option itself, it was just the text area. We added a new description that's going to be available on product pages. So on the front end for end users and you will have like full flexibility on what you're doing. So you will have like slash comments, the possibility to add text in bold to add bullet points, catchy colors or building blocks if you wish. Really like attract.

Olivier: 7:26

Because people really need this this flexibility to have something really

Juliette: 7:31

If they wish doing. So yeah. Uh, again, it's not uh, as Pierre said, it's not, um, mandatory. But if people want to do it, we want to enable uh, the...

Olivier: 7:41

Sure. And even if it's not usable everywhere, I guess, uh, you have to have this view, so I might be wrong. Just tell me if I, if I am the I think it's a very competitive subjects website like that. So when you're doing your own and you. Have, of course, competitors. They might do things that you don't. And, at some point you...

Juliette: 8:05

It's a blocking point, and you are frustrated with.

Olivier: 8:07

Users will see it. And maybe, maybe they will go to the competitors because they more attractive. So I think you have to reinvent it. Like quite often it's good to have this flexibility. Right?

Juliette: 8:20

Exactly. Um, another thing that we worked on was the navigation, um, because we are browsing your website. So, for example, we add little tags on e-commerce, uh, tags that are going to be just informative labels. So let's imagine you're a grocery store and you're selling organic products. Of course you want your customers again to see that information like directly when they're seeing your product. So you'll be able to set those tags with either a color or an image. So it's going to attract the customer's eye. And um, and then of course the customers will also be able to filter your shop based on those tags because they want to see the organic product. They want to see them in one click.

Olivier: 9:06

It improves the navigation a lot. And again, I guess this is another key feature to have on a website because, you know, people are in a hurry today. Like all the time. And you don't want to spend 15 minutes...

Juliette: 9:20

Looking for something.

Olivier: 9:21

Or even five actually, just looking for, uh, do they have this product on the Uh, if they have a tag that allows sorting everything and you just have to click on one thing to have everything in one...

Juliette: 9:34

One click.

Olivier: 9:35

Way better.

Juliette: 9:36

Yeah. And, um, yeah, of course we cannot, uh, talk about navigation without

Olivier: 9:42

Sure, sure.

Juliette: 9:43

Of the e-commerce.

Olivier: 9:44

Come on. Who uses a mobile today?

Juliette: 9:46

Yeah.

Olivier: 9:47

Everyone actually.

Juliette: 9:49

Yeah. Of course people want to shop faster. They want to get product delivered to them in one click from their couch. So we redesign actually the checkout form of e-commerce, and we put the emphasis on the mobile. So the experience is really like faster, smoother.

Olivier: 10:04

And what is important when you're doing such a redesign for a mobile version of in bigger size or what do you play with to, to to have a better navigation?

Juliette: 10:18

Of course you need the design to be adapted to the, the screen size, for Uh, but there are things that you can have in a laptop screen, for example, that don't it simply doesn't fit in mobile.

Olivier: 10:31

Sometimes you...

Juliette: 10:32

To change the layout, uh, so that yeah, it's easily clickable. The steps are. I know going from one step to another is easy. It doesn't require too many clicks or the the buttons are not too small, there are....

Olivier: 10:46

Do you sometimes display less information and have like a pop up to have them

Juliette: 10:50

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Those are things that you do so that you don't also have too much information on a small screen, cause that's disturbing.

Olivier: 10:58

Mhm. Yeah. And it is probably the kind of subject that you have to to test a Right.

Juliette: 11:03

Yeah, exactly. And on different devices as well.

Olivier: 11:06

Mhm. And you have to see the actual result before saying okay this is good.

Juliette: 11:09

Of course.

Olivier: 11:10

Yeah. Mhm. Mhm. Right. Um. Mhm. Okay. Um. Anything else on the website side? On the e-commerce side, yeah.

Juliette: 11:19

Actually, we also wanted to provide greater flexibility in customer management their customers, because when you're having an e-commerce, sometimes you don't you don't have like direct contact with your end customers. So it's important for them to be able to have an experience without needing to call you because they cannot, um, find or change the right information. For example, at the moment it was not possible during the checkout process to edit or change or even add new billing addresses as a, um, a customer, you could do it for delivery addresses, but it was lacking for, um, invoicing addresses. So that's something we, we worked on. Um, we also worked on the digital files and attachments, uh, or so-called product documents.

Olivier: 12:11

What is that?

Juliette: 12:11

So what is that? Good question.

Olivier: 12:13

What is that? I mean, it's mysterious. Uh, product documents. Whoa. Uh.

Juliette: 12:18

Um, yeah. So let's imagine you're, um, you're selling your teaching online material beforehand. You will now be able to upload those documents in Odoo and link them to a product, which that's why it's called product documents and decide, okay, when do I want my students to have access to this material? Maybe it's a free course and you want to. You want your PDF to be available to all customers when they are browsing your shop, but that's probably not the case. Or maybe you just want the customer to have access to it when they actually paid for the product, which makes sense in our example. So yeah, you're going to create those documents and decide when they are available to your customers. It works for, as I said, course material but also assembly instructions if you're a furniture shop, certificates or whatever.

Olivier: 13:12

As usual in Odoo, we want to make it really customizable and have full When you create that in the back end on your side.

Juliette: 13:20

Yeah, because it depends on your business.

Olivier: 13:22

Of course, of course. All right. So you mentioned that you redesigned some things from for the mobile side and further for the checkout. Are there other redesigns that people can expect for for this version in Odoo. And and again, what was what why was it important to make them.

Pierre: 13:42

Yes of course. So the design is very, very important for us. It's a big, big part of our of our job. And yeah, the, the, the designer team this year worked on, on the portal, you know, so when you as a customer you log in and it's where you can see your ongoing orders, you know, the delivery date and this kind of stuff. So it's very important. We reworked the events. So now the application where you can see all the events that are upcoming, like for Odoo, the Odoo Experience stuff. And the forum as well. And so we and we appointment as well. I think we intend to review basically all the apps that have an online presence. Um, there are a few objective. First is of course make them very nice, customizable to some extent, and also to be, um, consistent. In the past it was not very consistent. And so yes, consistency is very key. And then of course, as Juliette said that they all look nice on mobile. We also make sure at the same time that that every app is responsive as it should be.

Olivier: 14:46

So improve navigation in modernize everything for everyone.

Pierre: 14:50

Modernize consistency, customization, responsiveness. I think that's the so it's a lot of it's a lot of work.

Olivier: 14:56

Sure, sure. And talking about a lot of works and new things coming, I would like now to have a word about maybe new cool features because we we talked about new features already, but are there like trendy topics and actually I know there are some I'm sorry, I'm spoiling the episode a little bit. Uh, trendy features that are coming for for this version of Odoo. And why again, are they interesting for people? What is the need behind them? So could you explain what is coming?

Pierre: 15:24

Yeah. So it's a very good question. So of course I imagine you, you are thinking about ChatGPT and all those stuff.

Olivier: 15:30

I don't know. You tell me.

Pierre: 15:32

And all those kind of AI generated text.

Olivier: 15:35

Very Trendy topic.

Pierre: 15:35

Yes. Of course. Um, so maybe first, uh, a step back on that. We had a very interesting conversation with Fabian, our CEO, who explained to us that we have to be kind of careful with those trendy topics. Those um, and he gave an example, uh, blockchain, Bitcoin, Airtable. And he said all those kind of trends, we decided not to jump on it and use them when they were trendy, trendy, exploding if you want because he says, um, we have to find a problem that we want to solve and not say, oh, there is this technology, we should use it, uh, without any problem trying to solve. And so, um, so ChatGPT is very exciting. There are a lot of possibilities and we will do some. So we we there are two features that we will be released in the version 17. Um, tell.

Olivier: 16:31

Us, tell us what the new toys are. Spoiler. Yeah.

Pierre: 16:34

So the, the, the first one will be when when you as I explained earlier, when Now what will happen is that the first website, the text of the website, the text inside the pages will be built by ChatGPT actually 3.5.

Olivier: 16:52

Like always or is it optional?

Pierre: 16:54

Um, it it will be always, except if your language is not translated, which And so, um, and it's not a lot of things, it's like a, uh, maybe 40 strings if you, if you, uh, that will be adapted to your need. And it's just a wow effect. Perfect. So imagine you start a website and you say, I don't know, I sell pharmaceutical products you might have in the past, you would have had text about, uh, maybe furnitures. And it was it was not so bad anyway. You would you would have changed. But now all your text will be about discover this new medicine or about plants and stuff, because ChatGPT is very, very good at that.

Olivier: 17:33

Yeah, indeed. And and I think you're perfectly you're perfectly right. Uh, all those pieces of text at the end of the day are just we are just and are still just placeholders that you put there so that the guy can have an idea of what the website is going to look like in the end. But I think it's better if they correspond to the actual business of the user, because then maybe he will get new ideas. Maybe he will realize that something is not right and changed it. So way better indeed.

Pierre: 18:01

Yeah, yeah. It's one of our objective as product owner is to provide a wow So we want people that never tried Odoo when they tried for the first time that in five minutes we say they have to have at least ten wow effects. They have to. It has ten times they have to say wow, it does this. I did not expect that, you know, and and of course this new feature will help that. Sure.

Olivier: 18:21

Because it's a bit magic.

Pierre: 18:23

It's, it's clearly magic. And then the second new feature that will uh, back end. And so when you build like an email to your customers or in the front end, when you are designing your website page to, to ask basically ChatGPT and you can select a task and you can a text and then you can ask ChatGPT, hey, can you summarize it? Can you change the tone to make it more professional, more friendly, more persuasive? Um, so that if you so if either you can select a text and then ask this.

Olivier: 18:58

Okay, so you can provide something that you already wrote and say make this more Uh, and it will do it for you.

Pierre: 19:04

And give me another alternative. Give me another alternative. Uh, longer or shorter. So very in just a few clicks, you don't have to write a prompt. You know, just a few buttons.

Olivier: 19:13

It's really good, cause I, I think it's it's really a big part of the complexity And I think it's not the first one that jumps into your mind when you think about making a website, it's just writing the content in an attractive way, because writing something is is fine. I mean, you know what you're selling, you know what you want people to know, but doing it in an in an attractive way is a whole different matter. Yeah. And I think it's easing the thing a lot here.

Pierre: 19:36

So exactly. So I'm sure it will be very good. Also you can make sure, like you said, you can make sure you have the same tone in all your website, which is very important. Um, and then another usage, uh, if you don't know what you want, which could also happen when you create a website page, you can ask ChatGPT, please write me. I need to write a page about this. Again, it will be very useful in the back end as well if you have to say for example, please, I need to write an email to my customer to say that there is some delay in the delivery. For example, for my products, ChatGPT is probably very good at writing those kind of emails for you.

Olivier: 20:13

Sure, because it's very standard. And so essentially it's repeating patterns Mhm. And uh, I guess it's also important maybe for people really starting up their business for this kind of use case when they are not exactly sure how to talk to the customer, and they can have examples really easily like that and just, well learn what the typical pattern is with this kind of features. Uh, okay. So uh, this is essentially well. Especially useful when you are starting a new website. But there is also this case, you know and you know where I'm. What I'm coming to. You know, this case of people having already a website on something else than Odoo and then wanting to move to Odoo. And there is a feature that was announced quite a while ago, so it's not exactly new. The announcement is not new, but the feature is there now. What is it?

Pierre: 21:02

So thanks to Olivier, you are allowing me to talk again about this feature.

Olivier: 21:06

Go on.

Pierre: 21:07

For those who didn't know, I presented last year, say it was coming soon. So soon is now. A year later, we or our team developed a tool that can scrap existing website so it will browse through your. So when you start a new trial, you will be able to say, hey, I already have this website and give a URL. It will go through the website pages and copy the structure, the URLs, the text, the image, the I mean all your website basically. So yeah, this is very exciting because it should simplify a lot. The life of people that already have a website. Maybe, you know, you start it as a company selling, I don't know, candles and you maybe you ask someone, you pay him €1,000 and they build you a website and you have no idea. You cannot maintain it, you cannot do anything. So you want to move to Odoo because the the builder is much easier to use. Also, maybe because the backend is is more powerful. You know, you know, you want to do appointments, you want to do price lists. If you sell.

Olivier: 22:07

As usual, you know, do everything is integrated at the same place. And that's one of the big added values.

Pierre: 22:12

Exactly. So you, you know, you are convinced you want to use Odoo because you're

Olivier: 22:18

But the problem your site is something else.

Pierre: 22:18

The problem is something you don't want to do a web design and you don't want to And so with the scraper, you just have to type in your the URL of your existing website and then Odoo boom, everything is done for you. The menu, the pages, the products. Even so that's very interesting is that products blog. They they have on each page. They are metadata. So it's very easy for the scraper for our tool to recognize what is the product name, what is the product description, the price, even the image. So so if you have thousands of candles you will not have to export it. Import it. It's very hard. You don't know what layout etcetera. You just the scraper will go through your product page and create them immediately.

Olivier: 23:02

Sure, sure. And that's that's very good. So of course it's not going to copy what's on the server side if you have other custom developments, it's just the interface. But I think it's already easing the process a lot because this kind of of migration from one platform to the other must be a nightmare to do in practice.

Pierre: 23:20

Imagine you have 50 pages. On each page, you have link to your maybe 4 or 5 link to the other page if you have to do it again. It's a lot of work here. We just, you know, we will do all the things for you. The URL will be built, the link between the pages will be done. The. Yeah. So it's we're very amazing. It's super it's super exciting to see it in action. I can't wait to see it in action.

Olivier: 23:42

I understand why. Okay, so we are reaching the end of the episode already. I'd like as a conclusion to talk a bit about what will be coming for the next versions of Odoo. So not Odoo 17, Odoo 18 and maybe later who knows? Do you have like so? Maybe not something very specific, but just a direction in which you want to go for each of your scope? Juliette first.

Juliette: 24:04

Yeah, I mean, we've already reached a pretty good level. We're quite proud of ourselves. And yeah, we can look straight into Shopify and be proud.

Olivier: 24:13

Which is already good.

Juliette: 24:14

Yeah, but of course we are still thinking and working on cool features because Uh, so yeah, we're gonna continue.

Olivier: 24:26

Navigation is of the essence.

Juliette: 24:27

Navigation, usability. The mobile of course, is going to be like important topics for us.

Olivier: 24:33

All right. Pierre.

Pierre: 24:34

Um, yeah, very similar for me. And also the, the design I would say so, you know, work on existing blocks, see how they look like, and can we improve them and stuff like that. Suggest new layouts.

Juliette: 24:46

Yeah. The design is a continuous improvement. It's like you do it and you're done. It's...

Olivier: 24:51

Yeah. Plus the the the rules, the the the the trends change all the time. They evolve all the time. Of course, our website is not the same today as it was like even two years ago. The the tendencies are not the same. So okay. Well thank you very much for your answers.

Pierre: 25:06

Thank you.

Olivier: 25:06

You gave a lot of insights and a lot of, of, uh, of explanations on the new And I think it was super interesting.

Pierre: 25:12

Thanks a lot, Oliver.

Juliette: 25:13

Thanks for welcoming us.

Olivier: 25:15

That's your glimpse into what's to come with Odoo 17. For those itching to know more, rest assured we have several roadmap episodes lined up covering diverse areas like marketing and more. And don't forget, mark your calendars for the big Odoo 17 unveiling at Odoo Experience in November. There is so much to uncover, so keep tuning in. Until next time. Cheers!