Many users have been requesting for this feature, as we always answer to calls of our esteemed community we have done the necessary template changes for add-ons to be plugged in to extract the following data into CSV’s and PDF’s;

• Punch in/out
• Attendance report
• Leave list and summary
• Applicant details

With this new version Attendance Reports of all employees can be viewed at once, which was not possible previously.

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Yet another group of IT research developers have joined hands with OrangeHRM to assist us with some key development projects. These young talents are part of a project funded by the National ICT R&D known as “Integration of Open Source Software Projects in IT Education”.

Since the 2nd half of 2009 these researchers from the University of Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan have been working on few projects that were assigned to them and upon the successful completion of these projects we gained more confidence and realized the potential of the team. This led us to let them work on a new feature being the Meeting Scheduler which is under development.

We are glad to work with these IT research developers and we welcome more developers from around the world to join hands with our community.

Aisha Khan, a Research Officer at the PUCIT said,

“Open source software provide students an opportunity to work with enterprise level software, examine their architecture and extend their functions; which polishes their skills and enhance their knowledge. Working with OrangeHRM has been a great experience. Project community is extremely active and they provided us complete guidance. OrangeHRM is following coding standards and Test Driven Development which is extremely good. Understanding OrangeHRM architecture enhanced our concepts. We got the opportunity to learn new PHP framework Symfony.”

Community feedback on bug fixes also helped us in improvement. Community wants contributors to follow a systematic way, as first we understood architecture and fixed bugs then moved to feature development. This really helped us and made things easier to work with.

Features we are working on:

Meeting Scheduler
Configurable User Rights

Pipe-lined activities are “PIM Web Service” and some feature additions in “Recruitment Module” “

The PUCIT Team

A performance evaluation is a stressful time for a manager. With the OrangeHRM performance module we make performance evaluation a walk through the park. While ensuring accurate reviews this new module will save a great deal of money and time.

Although this module was not introduced to OrangeHRM earlier many organizations around the world like DUKE NUS - Singapore, The ORS Group - Australia and CIM Technologies - USA use performance modules designed by OrangeHRM to suit each of these companies requirements.

This module will be released with the next stable version OrangeHRM 2.6. Development teams at OrangeHRM are working hard to release 2.6 by the end of March 2010.

A beta version will be released during the first week of March 2010.

PUCIT Lahore is a set of Pakistani contributors. They have proposed a Meeting Module for OrangeHRM. Requirements spec and UI spec are already posted in OrangeHRM Community Contributions forum for community feedback.

This will initially be developed as a third party module (means you have to separately download it and integrate) but if more users demand it, we would think about adding it to core product. Please take some time to review the specs and give the feedback to make their attempt a success.

OrangeHRM currently doesn’t have a proper mechanism to allow third party modules and plugins to be integrated. However certain community users have taken the initiatives to develop custom modules and plugins for OrangeHRM. We thought it’s good to provide them a medium for announcing their features and getting community feedback.

Based on that we launched OrangeHRM Community Contributions forum. Some instructions and guidelines are also in place. We hope the experience gained here will help us to develop a proper mechanism for integrating third party features.

The target set to be reached in the 1st quarter of next year was achieved much earlier with ease and just before the closure of a successful year for OrangeHRM even when the world was financially challenged. This achievement was greatly fueled by the revolutionized version 2.5 which was released in early October 2009.

Thanking the community on the achievement Co-Founder and CEO of OrangeHRM Sujee Saparamadu said, “It is clear that from community and customer support today OrangeHRM has reached yet another landmark. We are grateful to all our contributors. With your continued support we promise to make OrangeHRM the world’s most preferred HR System.”

While celebrating this milestone during the festive season OrangeHRM did not forget to offer some amazing offers to its users around the world.

Visit http://orangehrm.com/orange-promotion.php for more information.

Stepping into 2010 OrangeHRM has many surprises and promises it will be an eventful one and hoping to make OrangeHRM more productive and successful.

Just after releasing alpha.2 version of the upgrader, a failure to upgrade was identified when a customer defined in OrangeHRM has more than one projects. This was again found by few community users who tried alpha.2 version soon after releasing it. We decided to fix this issue immediately and release alpha.3 version since no other issues were reported and since this can be the only barrier for many of you to upgrade.

Please share your upgrade experience in comments area and report bugs (if you find any) as explained in upgrade instructions. Thanks again for all the community users who are driving this towards the success.

You can download orangehrm-2.5-upgrader-alpha.2 at Source Forge now. Following issues were fixed in this release.

• Failure of importing data from `hs_hr_time_event` table (Issue occurred when time event comments have single quotes).
• Failure to run the upgrader on non-standard MySQL port.

Both these issues were pointed out by our community users who tried alpha.1 version out. We thank you all for providing us this great support on improving the upgrader and hope you will try out this release as well. While we greatly appreciate pointing out issues, we also like to hear about successful upgrades. That will let us know how successful our effort is. Please share your upgrade experience in comments area. For reporting bugs, you can use Source Forge bug tracker as mentioned in upgrade instructions.

We are pleased to announce that orangehrm-2.5-upgrader-alpha.1 was released and available for download at Source Forge. This is an alpha release and hasn’t been gone through QA testing. Make sure you read and understand upgrade instructions properly before proceeding.

Upgrader has facilitated troubleshooting and has been designed in a way that it doesn’t make any change to your existing OrangeHRM installation. Read more at upgrade instructions and let us know your upgrade experience.

We released much awaited OrangeHRM 2.5 on October 6th. The urgency to release 2.5 did not give us much time to explain our plans to provide upgraders to 2.5. Since released, there has been much discussion on this and we thought to address the issue in this post.

First of all we need to say that we haven’t stopped providing automated upgraders for stable releases. We started it at version 2.4.1 and continued in version 2.4.2. We will do the same for version 2.5 but with a different approach. We didn’t release the upgrader with 2.5 basically for two reasons.

• First, creating upgraders take both development and QA effort. This could have led to further delays in releasing OrangeHRM 2.5 stable.
• Even after thorough testing, we noticed that few users had found issues in the upgraders. So, we decided to release it separately so that we can handle issues raised on upgraders separately and even provide new versions of the upgraders.

Currently we are working on 2.5 upgrader and it would take about 4 to 6 weeks to release it with QA testing. Once we finished the development, there is a chance to make an intermediate release without QA testing. However, if you are in too much of a hurry to get this done and has required technical background, below are the steps for upgrading from version 2.4.2 to 2.5.

1. First list down all the database schema changes by comparing dbscript/dbscript-1.sql in both versions.
2. Then check whether there are any changes in default data inserted by comparing dbscript/dbscript-2.sql.
3. Write SQL queries for all changes found in step 1 and 3. That is, to convert a 2.4.2 database into a 2.5 database.
4. Install 2.5 in a new location of your web server.
5. Get a database dump of your current installation of version 2.4.2.
6. Replace the 2.5 database using the dump of version 2.4.2.
7. Run all the SQL queries prepared in step 3 on replaced 2.5 database.
8. Check hs_hr_time_event and see whether there are more than one rows for same day, same project, same activity. If so, get the total duration of all rows and delete them. Then insert a new row with this duration. This is needed since in version 2.5, time entry has been simplified.

Above are the main steps to upgrade from version 2.4.2 to 2.5. If you try this out, make sure you don’t make any change to your existing 2.4.2 installation. That would let you continue in version 2.4.2 even if you get an error in upgrading.

Upgrading with OrangeHRM Support

If you are an OrangeHRM Support subscriber and if you made a request to upgrade from your existing version to 2.5, one of our support engineers will examine your current version (can be  2.4.2 or an earlier version) and database and make necessary changes. These requests are handled case by case but automated upgrader needs to handle all possible scenarios. That’s why it takes time.

So, for upgrading from version 2.4.2 to 2.5, you have following options.

• If you are in a hurry and has the required technical skills, you can follow the steps described above and do the upgrade.
• If you are in a hurry but hasn’t got the technical skills, you can consider doing the upgrade via OrangeHRM Support.
• If you can be bit patient, continue with 2.4.2 and upgrade when 2.5 automated upgrader is released.

Stay in touch with our blog for updates about the upgrader.