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Employee/Human Resources Open Source Packages?
Linker3000 asks: "I'm a great fan of Open Source software (I just wish my programming skills allowed me to give something back) and I have already impressed my boss by implementing a company intranet based on eGroupware, our broadband connected servers are monitored by Nagios, staff can participate in online surveys using PHPSurveyor and they can also attend online learning using Moodle, but so far I have not found anything to take care of our Personnel/HR requirements - a simple tool that would keep employee details, allow the Web-based booking, signing off and tracking of holiday requests and act as a repository for personnel-level correspondence and activities between staff and Area Managers. I have had a look through Sourceforge, Freshmeat and Google without finding anything even near to ideal (there's a few things in various states of readiness and planning), so am I missing that 'one' Open Source HRMS (Human Resources Management System) that 'everyone talks about' or do I need to start looking at commercial apps? Either way, your advice and experiences would be appreciated."
If you have any SQL skills, and Perl or PHP, you could probably write your own in fairly short order.
at one of my previous employers, the new entry-level support guy wrote something just like this, just to teach himself Perl & SQL. His also included meeting room booking, and vacation autoresponders. It was his first foray into programming anything, and he did it in about two weeks.
Can't be that hard.
I know this company, Northwind, that has a pretty sweet employee database that they made. Maybe I can find the samples I have somewhere...
I suppose you have two simple options....learn the skills you would need to write your own app and release it to the community, or ask the community to write one. Sounds like a realativly simple project to me. You could ask around on dirrent forums or even post the job on http://www.rentacoder.com/ and you could ask people to do it for free.
Use "CRM" as your search term. Compiere might fit your needs.
Disclaimer: I've never used it, just ran across it when I was researching something similar to you. For our purposes, a request tracker did what we needed better than a fullblown CRM package.
"I'm a great fan of Open Source software (I just wish my programming skills allowed me to give something back)"
"I don't have good programming skills" is a pathetic excuse, when it comes to Open Source. There are tons of ways to give back, without having high-end C/C++/Java/whatever skills.
Two ways that come to mind, immediately, are:
Other areas in which you can help are: sysadmin, mailing list moderation, meta-projects, hosting... etc.
If you already do [some of] these things, then kudos to you--you DO give back.
(as you might've guessed from the links, I'm involved with PHP's documentation, but I don't write much C. Though I don't frequent php.general, I do give back in a number of ways..)
S
In my experience, HR types typically _hate_ when IT guys get in their business. I've found that they hold on to the little bubble of power that they have, and don't want Sys. Admins knowing anything about anything HR related (who gets paid what, etc).
That's just been my experience. I tried to have the HR girl at one of previous jobs use an "Add new employee" intranet page that would add the user to the network, phone system, and even print them out a little sheet of paper with their phone extension, user sign-on's etc. She reluctantly obliged my department half of the time. The other half of the time, it was a pissing match about "it's not my job to add users" (I told her it was a user-add "request").
Anyway, just be weary of HR types when you try to come into their space to make their lives easier.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
If you have put the total of your requirements in your post then your requirements are as follows:
Think about using eGroupware. You already have it installed and know the application. Try to make it meet your requirements.
Can you add custom fields to eGroupware? If so you could store a lot of this information in there
eGroupware has a meeting request system. Could you use this as a leave request system. Employee enters in leave request, invites the approving manager, manager approves or rejects. From http://www.egroupware.org/?category_id=43
Have a look at http://www.egroupware.org/acl as this would seem to allow you to meet the third requirement. You should be able to make this work.
If you could make eGroupware meet the HR requirements this would simplify things for you with less applications to run, less training required.
Gavin
The weathers here - Wish you were beautiful
About HR-XML
The HR-XML Consortium is an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to the development and promotion of a standard suite of XML specifications to enable e-business and the automation of human resources-related data exchanges.
Human resources-related e-business -- or any inter-company exchange of HR data -- requires an agreement among participants about how the transaction or data exchange will be accomplished.
The mission of the HR-XML Consortium is to spare employers and vendors the risk and expense of having to negotiate and agree upon data interchange mechanisms on an ad-hoc basis. By developing and publishing open data exchange standards based on Extensible Markup Language ("XML"), the Consortium provides the means for any company to transact with other companies without having to establish, engineer, and implement many separate interchange mechanisms.
The HR-XML Consortium is driven by the needs and priorities of its members. Any member can propose that the Consortium undertake a standards activity. Proposals are subject to a review process and must include the names of at least three sponsor organizations as well as satisfy other pre-requisites."
[Ontology based Recruitment Process]
Abstract: In our research we explore the benefits resulting from the application of
Semantic Web technologies in the recruitment domain. We use currently available
standards and classifications to develop a human resource ontology which gives us
means for semantic annotation of job postings and applications. Furthermore, we
outline the process of semantic matching which improves the quality of query results.
Finally, we propose an architecture of an evaluation system based on Semantic Web
technologies.
I'm guessing that if the HR system goes down, you don't meet payroll and not only are you fired but the company will lose most of its high performing talent. How many people are going to be willing to work with the 0.0.1 version of an OSS system? HR is mission critical stuff, if many times very prosaic. Its nonexistence might be because it's so risky to get wrong, even once.
Dspace would be a part of any solution. What makes it complicated is that HR isn't a single discipline, but several under one tagline.
is probably the way to go for this type of situation. It is *relatively* cheap (1-5k), and interfaces with all of the major accounting packages. BTW... In most cases the accounting people don't interface with HR data. The might see agregate data -- but don't have access to individual employees, which is all in the HR Dept. This type of project doesn't lend itself well to OS solutions since it requires constant updates due to changing legal and regulatory requirements. Contrary to what many here have said, an HRMS is not a matter of throwing a few lines of SQL together with a couple of forms. The legal ramifications alone can be significant. Things such as WARN, VET-100, federal contracting requirements, drug testing, worker's comp, and unemployment management is a little more complex than average -- multiply this by 53 US jurisdictions, plus city and county issues, plus international issues. Although not conceptually difficult to program(assuming you are familiar with the regs), it requries a lot of updates and HR professionals to be constantly reviewing the content. Again, ABRA at the 50 employee to 1000 employee is probably the best. After that you start getting into Peoplesoft and Oracle HR Solutions. Note: I work for no-one in this industry currently.
Unfortunately, it's really not, at least not if you're going to get any useful long-term benefits from it.
OK, for a small, local outfit maybe something simple would have some value. However, for larger companies, and certainly for those with staff in multiple jurisdictions, the amount of red tape and regulations you have to deal with just to employ someone these days is staggering.
SAP is a monster, it's true, but it didn't become so just because.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Then your system security and processes suck, you are incompetent, and your employer is probably being negligent in continuing to employ you.
There is a difference between
- being able to access and control all the systems
- being able to access and change all the confidential data without adequate checks and balances (such as knowing a separate password to access confidential employee information, or having proper, audited logs so someone will notice if you change anything in that category).
As a sysadmin, you only need one of these. As a responsible sysadmin, you should ensure that no-one can do the other.If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Wow. I'm suprised nobody had jumped down this guy's throat for using eGroupware, the bastard child of phpGroupware. eGroupware is *not* GPL compatable. it was a splinter group of phpGroupware that took off when they started rejecting their CVS submissions because they weren't licensed GPL compatable.
:)
Amusingly enough, eGroupware just split again because the guy who started the whole mess took off and decided to take his code with him. Because the code wasn't GPL'd the rest of his little crew of insurgents were screwed.
ironic..
Run. I like water. Push My rutabaga.
Try eHRMS... http://www.asix.com.my/ehrms/ Very slick.