John,
I really don't think you understand the philosophy behind our product. But let's get started with answering your questions one by one:
[quote:fogc0igw]a. access restrictions though it looks great I find it a major bug that if I select f.e. Employee and Manager I CANNOT leave the criteria EMPTY which should mean ALL records allowed. That did not work.
Now I have to put: Created by is not equal to User Login or Created by is equal to User Login
And I am stuck with ADD! without criteria it does not show up for Employee or Manager. But WHAT do I select for criteria there? Company Name is empty?[/quote:fogc0igw]
Why did you even go to edit criteria? I mean what was wrong with the default settings?
When you setup EPESI you create the first account and the first contacts for the first (Main) Company. And you have superadmin rights. Typically this will be a person from IT staff but quite often this will an owner of the business. Not every company uses IT guy or consulting company to setup CRM.
But we also setup EPESI for our customers - when you do it just pretend you are their employee. Setup the company with their info and then you will create another company for yourself and move your contact there.
Every contact under the main company (we could call them Employees), can be converted to EPESI user by creating a login. For a login you need a valid e-mail address and random password is generated and e-mailed. You have to make sure that your e-mail server settings are correct and tested.
When assigning roles you will treat some users as Employees (Access Level) and some as both Employees and Managers.
As for admin rights? If you want to give some control to an office manager for example - change admin rights from none to admin. You - as a superadmin - can define areas that admin has access to. For example you don't want to be bothered with creating new Company and Contact groups. Or new currencies.
Employee can create records and edit them and delete, but only if they created them. They can not delete records created by others but they can edit them. Of course all changes are kept in record's history to which admin has access to. And since we use lazy delete no record is really deleted and superadmin can restore any record at any time.
Managers can delete all records.
All of these settings can be changed editing permissions per recordset and I see you were heavily playing with it. You did not have to. I don't know how much data did you already entered there but I would suggest to start from scratch. I see from your earlier post that you have basic problems:
[quote:fogc0igw]Record Browser: Access restrictions => when I use as per example f.e. Add - Access:Employee AND Access:Manager it does NOT work. The subject f.e. Companies does not show up at all for a manager that logs in. I added each separately, so View - Access:Employee - with criteria, and View - Access:Manager with no criteria. Then it works. There is a bug in the Add Clearance routine.[/quote:fogc0igw]
Did you install Account Manager module? How are your filters setup and perspective? In Companies perspective controls Account Manager filter. These feature was requested bu our users.
[quote:fogc0igw]Logo: whenever an update or a module install or update occurs ALL logo images are overwritten.[/quote:fogc0igw]
Yes, this is how it works. We plan to change it to allow admin upload a custom logo. For now after the upgrade you need to overwrite the template file. Keep in mind that due to MIT license you need to provide the copyright information.
I see that you generally have a problem with displaying anywhere that people are using EPESI. Support About? Do you have a problem with any other application you are using to show who created it? As for a link to the forum - there are some power users who try to learn. Our forum is a support tool - you ended up here as well - and we want to make it easy for our users. Just spoke yesterday with a user who installed EPESI on his own hosting service and managed to setup a business using this support forum. We also welcome opinions of end users.
As for most of things you are struggling against I can assure you - it can be done. EPESI is modular and you can add and remove parts of it as you wish.
For Bugtracker - if you want to use it but don't like the name - just go to Translations and search for words you want to change and give them your own name. Maybe you want to call your Contacts Customers? This is where you do it. Menu can be translated as well. Fields can be added or deactivated, just be carefull with some that are required. You will find your way around I am sure.
[quote:fogc0igw]Project and tickets: it's a CRM, not only a programmers' CRM? It does not say so on your site. Most businesses that will use your script have Employees, Salesmen, Managers, Customers, Leads, etc... No programmers there. What we need is for customers to be able to log in just to see what is going on with their project which is business consultancy items in this case. Tickets are just meant for support comment or wishes or whatever, so the account manager can follow up.[/quote:fogc0igw]
As I wrote above - do you find it useful? Just don't like the naming of it? Then change names using translation tool. But maybe this is not what are you looking for. You don't write anything about the case you want to solve. Maybe you need a custom module? EPESI CRM is a starting point - a kit with EPESI framework and to get started several CRM modules. You can remove all of them - down to Companies and Contacts as this is at the same time user management tool. There is distro.ini file where you can specify which modules should be included in the installation. Believe me we took into consideration different needs of different users.
[quote:fogc0igw]Don't you sell shopping cart and inventory modules? That is for programmers? Or for businesses that sell products? I am not familiar with those modules (yet) but can customers log in there? [/quote:fogc0igw]
Yes we do - did you visit the demo?
EPESI Store: http://epe.si/extension-modules
Inventory module: http://epe.si/inventory-management
"That is for programmers?" - no and yes. It is a tool to quickly setup an online application to organize your data. Users can just get ready to use modules, tweak it and use. Programmers can develop new modules.
[quote:fogc0igw]1. Assigned Employees and Managers cannot add companies or contacts and give them login access. Why not? Now, only Admin or SuperAdmin can do so.[/quote:fogc0igw]
You did something wrong. Start another installation and don't change any permission settings. It will work.
[quote:fogc0igw]2. ShoutBox does not have a FLUSH. What is there, stays there?[/quote:fogc0igw] - yes - id does not have flush. If you want to you can delete data in the table to remove records.
[quote:fogc0igw]3. Dashboard widget access cannot be restricted? F.e. we don't want a customer to be able to add whatever he wants.[/quote:fogc0igw]
You can restrict access to Dashboard. You say - customers. Well then you need to create a completely new access level and define rights. Remove Employee and Manager access rights. Customer by default will see only his own record and his own company.
[quote:fogc0igw]4. The lack of a complete administrator manual is really a miss. I am a system analyst and programmer for over 30 years, 15 years of Web programming, and some things I do not understand out of the box. Explanation of what you guys were thinking and how you did it, would be really helpful and save a lot of try-and-error time.[/quote:fogc0igw]
I am aware that the manual is not complete. We are constantly working on adding new articles to our wiki. We are also testing an interactive help engine and in the new version it will be introduced. All manuals are on our wiki:
http://epesi.org/index.php?title=Category:User_manual
[quote:fogc0igw]As I work with setting it up for the customer I come across things that could/should be there. I hope you appreciate input from users. Many script publishers don't and their product just floats away from their customers. I've seen that a lot over the past 15 years and they just perish. I hope you guys are not one of them, because I DO love your product. The idea is great.[/quote:fogc0igw]
The entire application is designed with end users in mind and we try to satisfy different business scenarios. We include features that we need in our day-to-day operations as well as add and modify features requested by our customers and end users. A lot of suggestions and bugs reported on this forum is taken into consideration. If you have an idea or specific need please describe it here on this forum. Please note, that we have a long list of features that are already being developed or are on our waiting list and of course the first ones to be implemented are those that are needed because of current business case we try to solve, then ones that will benefit most end users.
If you are a programmer than you may want to develop your own modules using our framework. It really does speed up the development process especially when you utilize Record Browser engine.
