VenDoc

About PraKom

PraKom, an Austrian software company, was founded in 2008. PraKom's first product VenDoc (an ERP software solution) currently addresses the needs of over 750 companies in both the DACH and South Tyrol regions of Europe.

PraKom first began using our WinForms Controls, but soon opted to leverage the architectural flexibility of the Cross-Platform .NET App UI (XAF) and ORM Library (XPO). After the initial learning curve and redesign, PraKom was able to incorporate XAF's security, conditional appearance, validation, reporting, analysis, and workflow modules within VenDoc. PraKom also customized and extended numerous modules that ship as part of the XAF framework.

How Has DevExpress Helped You and Your Customers?

One of ParKom's key requirements was application flexibility. We needed our customers to freely modify our software. By default, XAF generates basic List and Detail Views with CRUD functionality. All layouts are fully-customizable at design time and runtime (both in code and visually by end-users). UI settings like validation and appearance rules, list and detail view layouts can be stored in the file system or a database. Because XAF offers UI separation settings per user and per application (with copy/paste and merge capabilities for maximum control), PraKom has been able to deliver solutions that are always customizable. XAF also allows us to manage application users, roles and access rights via permission policies. We can even load custom XAF modules at runtime based on a customer's specific business needs.

With the help of the eXpand Framework (a set of open source extensions for XAF), we've been able to extend the XAF even further. We made the application model completely customizable at runtime (for instance, allowing a business model extension with custom members; and application model editing with the Model Editor). All of this is embedded directly into XAF Views – see the Model Difference module for more information.

The bottom line - XAF has helped us deliver a highly flexible and stable product. XAF allows us to quickly deliver new functionality with a relatively small team. We started with one developer and now have 8 developers working on our XAF-based software.

Project Name: VenDoc

VenDoc is a complete ERP solution, but because of XAF's modular approach, we also offer about 80 additional modules for our customers to extend its core and address different business requirements.