OpenMRS Road Map Update

The OpenMRS leadership team met in Boston earlier this month to review OpenMRS priorities. Before meeting, we asked for your feedback on OpenMRS priorities to help guide the road map over the next year. Your feedback really helped inform our discussion and focus our priorities. We heard very clear priorities for improving existing functionality and improving our documentation. We also heard that priorities apply not only to the OpenMRS “core”, but also to modules bundled with OpenMRS, including HTML Form Entry, XForms, the latest Reporting framework, and Logic.

This is our proposed road map for OpenMRS in 2011. We welcome continuous feedback from the community (implementers and developers) on our priorities, since meeting the needs of our implementations is at the core of our mission.

Documentation: The most frequent request from the community feedback was for improved documentation.  In 2011, OpenMRS will dedicate significant resources toward improving documentation for developers and implementers and setting up the infrastructure to keep the documentation improving in the years to come.

In the next few weeks, we will create opportunities for the community to participate in forming our strategy; look for notifications (on mailing lists, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) as we welcome broad community input to improve OpenMRS documentation.

Improving Existing Functionality: Over the past few years, we introduced several new features to OpenMRS; however, in many cases these features have not been widely adopted (or as widely adopted as their potential) because we have not refined or simplified them.