Are questions about ERP products on-topic here at Serverfault?

Question

I work for a state university as a developer (the sysadmins are in another department, but as I imagine it is everywhere sometimes duties overlap). I often have questions about some of the software products that we use, and the questions are in no way appropriate for SuperUser.

One such product is called Appworx. It is made by a company called Automic (though these thing get traded around and merged so often I can hardly keep track). Think of it as cron on steroids and bath salts (mostly bath salts). You can schedule jobs that are shell scripts of Oracle procedures or just about anything else, put conditions and notifications and a bunch of other crap. They can become complex enough that they're almost like simple programs themselves.

Would questions about this software product be off-topic? I do not have simple, zero-research questions. I feel as if I could answer many questions myself about it, were they to be asked.

Sample question:

How do I configure the IMPEXP built-in job in Appworx such that objects are pre-mapped during export?

Some background for those unfamiliar with the software: You export jobs and chains (sequences of jobs) via an export menu in the test server's interface, then import it in a similar way on the production server. But that menu just kicks off an unscheduled, ad hoc job. I chucked that into a chain that in addition to exporting it also checks it into git, adds the chain to an inventory page on Confluence, etc. But the IMPEXP job takes a parameter called "map file" or something like that, and it's not clear if this can be used when exporting, or only when importing.

Not quite a programming question, definitely not a user question.

Answer 1

Generally the deciding factor is going to be whether the question pertains to administering the system.

If the question is about installing or maintaining the system, (e.g. How do I configure the Appworx Agent?) then it would be appropriate, but if it's about using the system as an end-user, (e.g. How do I submit a Banner job?) then it probably would not be, and you would be better served by your existing support channels.

I will also note that it doesn't appear that any questions about Appworx have ever been asked here, so even if the questions are on topic, they might not get timely answers. And if no moderators even understand the question, such as your sample question, then it likely won't be closed...

Answer 2

My brain is in shock trying to make sense of the pages and pages of buzz-words on the Automic web site... Is that stuff really considered ERP?

Anyway, based on my (not extensive) experience with ERP systems and (a bit more) with enterprise-wide financial systems, I wouldn't consider questions like your example to be systems admin. They're not necessarily development in the usual sense, but systems like this need a lot of work (call it what you will: customization, development, implementation, tailoring...) to make them function for a particular company, and to me that's closer to developing the system than to administering it.

And if you look at the very small # of posts on ERP systems (~150 for SAP, and lot of those are incidental mentions of SAP, ~30 for OpenERP), it seems very unlikely that the people who might know about your automation product are posting here. By contrast, there are almost 3000 OpenERP questions on StackOverflow, and you've even got some answers (don't know if they're any good) to your Appworx questions over there.