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."

Options

[Kaamoss]

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/ [rentacoder.com] and you could ask people to do it for free.

CRM

[slashjames]

Use "CRM" as your search term. Compiere [compiere.org] 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.

Re:CRM

[portscan]

CRM is customer relations management. it is for tracking customers, not employees. the software you linked to is also ERP, which is enterprise resource planning (closer, but still not spot on). searching for CRM will not get him anywhere.

Re:Haven't seen any, but you could write your own

[Nutria]

HR/Personnel is in no way related to meeting room booking, and vacation autoresponders and I'm stunned that you'd think it is.

HR/Personnel is all about payroll, insurance, retirement packages, sensitivity training, sick days, vacation days, HIPPA, SOX and the 100,000 other bits of federal, state and local regulations.

HR-XML

[Anonymous Coward]

About HR-XML [hr-xml.org]

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 [fu-berlin.de]
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.

ABRA

[sgent]

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.