Friday, December 21, 2007

Openbravo and eZ Publish interoperability

Jordi Massaguer Pla has just published the connector that allows Openbravo ERP and eZ Publish to interoperate.

To integrate Openbravo with an e-commerce solution has been a common request from our community that can now be accomplish using eZ Publish.

In the eZforOb project page you have the file for download and all the technical details and instructions explaining how to install the solution. The integration is done using Openbravo web services.

The work has been done by Opentrends that kindly have make the effort to polishing the integration and publishing it. This work is publish as "it is".

Update: Jordi has published some documentation about this integration.

Monday, December 17, 2007

Openbravo stable versions policy

As you probably know a few weeks back we published our release policy. We now have a Community Edition that intends providing the community with a stable version of the product. The most recent Community Edition is Openbravo ERP R2.35 and a new Community Edition release is planned every six months. Defects can be reported against this edition but no guarantee is offered on when they will be fixed. Bug fixes are only distributed as part of subsequent Community Edition and back ported to an existing Community Edition at Openbravo's discretion.

Quality is a very important issue for us and our community members have often shown that is important to them also. Starting with Openbravo R2.3 series, we have an acceptance test that defines what tests a community edition must pass to be considered production quality. Our Quality Assurance process is open to everyone that wishes to participate and help us to make sure that the production releases is indeed stable enough for production purposes.

We are fully aware that no matter how much effort we put in the QA process, users implementing Openbravo in demanding situations will always be likely to find issues. Openbravo is committed to continuously fix issues even after the release of the product and always publishes those fixes to the community in source format in the development trunk. Users can extract them from there and apply them individually to their environments or wait for the next release to consume them in packaged form.

In addition to that, Openbravo - whenever it believes it is needed - will now go one extra step and packages fixes of the most severe issues affecting our community in the form of Maintenance Packs, which are fully tested before release according to the community process, and distributed both in source and binary format.

As an exemple, we now know that a maintenance pack is needed for 2.35 and next week we are starting the Quality Assurance for Openbravo 2.35 Maintenance Pack 1 that aims at correcting the most critical issues detected in R2.35 by our community. We are going to tag the Subversion repository to indicate exactly which source code has been used to produce the binaries for maintenance pack 1. We will provide very shortly details on the time frame to be able to participate in the QA process of this maintenance pack.

We are not going to do a stable branch version. Instead of investing time in back-porting and forward-porting fixes between different branches we are going to focus on making sure that our community stable version has a good quality when it is released and we will focus our investment on developing on trunk. Additionally, we want to encourage that all bug fixes are committed to trunk. If someone wants to apply a bug fix from trunk to the latest stable version can easily doing extracting the fix (revision) from Subversion and applying to its own installation.

Openbravo is going to lunch a subscription service that will offer updates and support during a life cycle of few years.

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Openbravo community highlights 4th of December

Hello everybody,

There are some news that happened during the past weeks:
That's all for now. If you have any news regarding Openbravo success or efforts, please let me know (jmas at openbravo.com)

Thursday, November 29, 2007

First chat community meeting done!

Last Tuesday, 27th of November 14.00 GMT, we had our first community chat meeting at Openbravo to coordinate our efforts and to comment on new developments. We also discussed the topics that people added to the public agenda. We were around 30 participants and we talked for two hours. There is a full log available. You can use the Open Discussion forum if you want to comment something on what has been discussed.

We really appreciate your participation and feedback. As action points for Openbravo before the next chat I have:
  • Localization/Accounting: Publish the 3rd test of our chart of accounts quality assurance process. Tests 1 and 2 (already available) verify that the initial client setup can be done correctly and the new one will verify that balanced sheet is properly balanced.
  • Localization/Translations: Publish a new set of tools to transform from Openbravo XML to Openbravo. Jens Wike wrote some tools and we are in the process of publishing them.
  • Development: Create a public development announcement mailing list to inform of important changes from a development point of view
We aim to schedule the next chat during December. We probably will do it between the 17th and 21th of December when people is not yet in their Xmas break. We will keep you posted.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

First community chat meeting on 27th of November 14.00 GMT

During the last months several people expressed the need of doing regular meetings to discuss the development of Openbravo ERP project. During the Openbravo Get Together last month we had lots of very constructive discussions around Openbravo ERP. To keep the discussion going we are going to hold a monthly community chat meeting where the new developments will be commented and also we will discuss the topics that you consider important.

Here you have all the information for the first meeting:

Date: 27th of November at 14.00 GMT
Where: IRC Network FreeNode at the #openbravo channel
Language: English

Please, if you are planing to attend it is important that you add your name to the chat meeting web page and also that you add any topic in the agenda would like to discuss.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

New Subversion server for Openbravo project

For the last 18 months Openbravo project has been using the Subversion service offered by Sourceforge to maintain the source code repository. Starting on November 2007, we start to use a Subversion server fully managed by us, and mirroring this repository to the Sourceforge server.

Having our own server allows us to offer better services to our community of developers that we can't do through standard Sourceforge services since some of the capabilities of subversion are partially truncated: like creating new repositories, private branches or better control in terms of server administration.

We plan to do is to create a branch for each developer in our community where they will be able to develop new functionalities. All the community-provided functionalities could be later be include as core functionalities of Openbravo or be packaged as plug-ins.

Openbravo will keep the Sourceforge subversion repository alive and synchronized using svk (as a read-only repository). This synchronization allows us to achieve three objectives:

1) Save bandwidth since most SVN access is in read only mode.
2) Preserve our activity ranking on SourceForge. Openbravo is still a very young project and we have been receiving a lot of attention from being one of the top projects in SourceForge; this has benefited both us and the community and it is very important for us to continue to be part of SourceForge.
3) Have a backup server in case the main Subversion server is down.

We have a document the explains how to access the new Subversion server. Also there is a new web based interface that allow browsing the repository and also subscribe to the changes using a RSS feed reader. If you are working on localization note that we have create a separate repository to store all the localizations.

Please, if you have any question or you need access to the Subversion repository you can contact me (jmas at openbravo.com).

Friday, November 9, 2007

Chart of accounts news and documentation

As we explained in Localization Round Table at Openbravo Get Together in Barcelona, Openbravo has been working hard on enhancing the chart of accounts support and its processes in the Openbravo ERP R2.3x release series.

We have been working with a consultancy company to identify which areas of Openbravo ERP could be enhanced, which documentation needed to be created, and finally, to produce a verified chart of accounts for United States.

Let me summarize the main results of these efforts:

What is new in Openbravo ERP R2.3x (regarding chart of accounts):

· The number of default accounts was reduced to 30, cleaning all the accounts that were defined but not used and verifying that the accounts left were used properly in the different parts of the application.

· Operands. Starting with Openbravo R2.35 it is no longer necessary to define the operands for accounts in the application. They can be defined in the chart of accounts directly. In R2.35 the operands of operators should be defined before using the operand. In the next version, it would be possible to use them in any place.

· The Initial Client Setup process has been revised making it more robust. It has been divided in different phases and it generates a very detailed report when importing the chart of accounts. This report helps to detect potential errors in the chart of accounts.

Chart of accounts

· The Chart of Accounts for United States has been simplified. It went from 300 to 100 accounts and it now builds correctly the balance sheet and the account of results. This is the chart of accounts that we recommend as example for people building chart of accounts in countries with similar account systems to United States, like Venezuela.

· The chart of accounts for Spain has also been enhanced to include the operands needed and to avoid having to define them in the application.

Testing the chart of accounts

We have created a testing process for Chart of Accounts that verifies that the chart of account is correct and that it builds the balance sheet correctly. We are encouraging all localizers to perform these tests in their chart of accounts.

Also we have been working on extending the documentation for the Chart of Accounts including a full description of all the accounts.

New chart of accounts for Openbravo R2.35

Starting with Openbravo R2.35, all the chart of accounts published at SourceForge are guaranteed to have passed the tests 1 and 2 in of our chart of accounts testing procedure. Right now, we have published the verified chart of accounts for United States, South Africa and Romania. We are working working with many contributors to verify and update the rest of chart of accounts.

We hope that all of these changes will easy the process of localizing Openbravo ERP to the different account systems. If you have questions, suggestions or doubts do not hesitate to use our Translations & Localizations forum.

Monday, October 29, 2007

Openbravo Get Together - highlights from 2nd day

Today was the second day of the Openbravo Get Together meeting. A full day dedicated to Openbravo product and technology. We were around 60 people during day.

Here a summary and links of today's main sessions:

· Openbravo: recent achievements, product roadmap and community contribution. Paolo Juvara Openbravo's Chief Products Officer and Ismael Ciordia Openbravo's Chief Technology Officer. Full presentation (PDF format).

- What is new in Openbravo R2.3x: Skins, Jasper Reports, Single sign-on. From a functional perspective: Accounting , Improved Openbravo Initial Client Setup (better error reporting). See complete release notes.
- Leassons learned: Improvement development practices, release management, target roadmap, leverage the community. Focus: quality and documentation.
- Openbravo Developer's edition: frequent releases, minimal QA process, publish features as soon as they are done.
- Openbravo Community Edition: stable, full QA process, release twice year. The recommended for production. See the Openbravo release policy.
- Product vision: productive, informative and collaborative, easy to understand, highly interoperable
- Product priorities: support exiting product, develop new functionality, broaden appeal to increase community, localization, develop next generation platform
- Documentation: functional documentation, developer's guide, implementation manual

· Openbravo development environment. Ismael Ciordia Openbravo's Chief Technology Officer and Adrián Romero, Senior Architect at Openbravo. Full presentation (PDF format).

- Code name ODE (Openbravo development environment): how to get the code, build from sources, update your environment, commit your changes to the Repository.
- Develop Openbravo using Eclipse. Projects files will be provided.
- All the database has been moved from a database dump to separate XML fields (better changes control) using DLLUtils. A single file for every table, trigger, etc.
- Fully enable PostgreSql as a development environment: build from sources, code development and commit changes to the repository
- ODE will be released and documented at the time that Openbravo ERP R2.35 is released (during November 2007).
- Use of Subversion ChangeLogs.

· Openbravo Green. Ismael Ciordia Openbravo's Chief Technology Officer and Adrián Romero, Senior Architect at Openbravo. Full presentation (PDF format).

- Open, modular, based on Open source stack.
- It is design to be easy to migrate from previous versions
- New MVC implementation based on Hibernate, Spring + Acegi, JSF (myFaces), DRW, Dojo
- If you are interested in commenting Green you can use Openbravo Green forum.
- See also Openbravo Green documentation.

· Localization and internationalization round table. Nicolás Serraro Openbravo's Chief Technological Strategist, Paolo Juvara Openbravo's Chief Products Officer and Jordi Mas Openbravo's Community Director. Full presentation (PDF format).

· Openbravo's community services. Josep Mitjà, Openbravo's COO and Jordi Mas Openbravo's Community Director. Full presentation (PDF format).

This is the last session of the event. It has been two days full of interesting presentations, talks and meeting people around the Openbravo ecosystem. In terms of participation it has been a success. Personally, the most relevant aspect has been great that everyone has given feedback in all the sessions is such a positive way and also had a very strong attitude regarding collaboration, sharing and participating in the Openbravo community.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Openbravo Get Together - highlights from 1st day

Today was the first day of the Openbravo Get Together meeting. A full day dedicated to how to do business with Openbravo. We were around 120 people during the morning and around 80 during the evening.

Here a summary and links of today's main sessions.

· The why and How of Open Source Participation. Matt Asay, General Manager, Americas. Full presentation (PDF format).

Matt started with a cool video merging images of FC Barcelona with Openbravo and commenting on the success of our project and community.

Matt's presentation has been focus on the dynamics of open source business and economics and which are the market trends, customer's options (based on polls) and successful strategies.

Here are some highlights of his talk:

- If the community does not do well, the company will not do well.
- When someone copies your software, the proprietary vision is that people are stealing your software. In free software world, the vision is that people is using your software.
- The focus has to be on writing exceptional open source software.
- A big problem for any software startup is to get people to use your software (dissemination) , something that open source solves very well.
- Proprietary software, you pay up front, the customer assumes all the risk. With open source, the customer buys services after has evaluated the product.
- The failure of "express" editions from IBM/Oracle against open source database (you can not fool people).
- In all open source projects, 85% of development is done by less than 15 developers.
- GPL is the most suitable license for business.
- Forking happens when you fail to take care of your community (Compiere/Adempiere, Joomla/Mambo)
- 10 open source vendors will do over $10m in 2007.

· Openbravo in the world of ERP. Manel Sarasa, Openbravo's CEO. Full presentation (PDF format).

- Introduction to open source and Openbravo community.
- Analysis of the cost structure of Open source vs. proprietary companies.
- Expending on software for SME (licenses: SME 27%, support: 36%, maintenance: 37%). Source ODC. 2004
- ERP adoption is SME is still low. Licenses costs are a hug burden for small firms.
- Use the 30% of license cost to adapt your software to your needs.
- Openbravo vision: All companies, regardless of their size, need a management system adapted to their needs.
- Mission: aims to offer the best possible management system and the tools needed for successful development and implementation.

· Session: Success Stories. Eugeni Vives, Openbravo's Chief Consulting Officer. Full presentation (PDF format).

- 2001 started with the first live customer.
- Openbravo customer profile: €2 - 50M millions revenue, ten to several hundreds employees. Currently focusing on the SME (SoHo discarted).
- Industries: manufacturing, distribution & logistics, engineering, professional services, media & publishing, construction.
- Estimate d 90 live installations lead by Openbravo or its partners. 89% customers in Europe (80% Spain), 7% LATAM and rest from others. Many others from community that we cannot count.
- Alimarket publications (100 employees, revenues ~10m): first know live implementation with PostgreSQL.
- First verticals in construction and publishing industries.
- Next industries: public administration (Centatic), City Hall (City Hall of Amorebieta), Telecom industry (Poland).

· Session: Common Customer View Project (Open Solutions Alliance project). Josep Mitjà, Openbravo's COO and Adrián Romero, Senior Architect at Openbravo. Full presentation (PDF format).

- Mission of the Open Solutions Alliance is to expand the market for business open source solutions.
- Areas of work: customer adoption, interoperability, explain benefits of open solutions, community engagement
- Founded by ISVs.
- Customer view project focus: interoperability on single sign on and data synchronization.
- Companies involved: Openbravo, CentricCRM, Adaptive Planning, JasperSoft, SpikeSource, Unisys
- Single sign-on thanks too LAM and based on CAS.

· Session: LibrePos and Openbravo in the retail market. Adrián Romero, Senior Architect at Openbravo and LibrePos author. Full presentation (PDF format). Full presentation (PDF format).

- LibrePos is a point of sale application designed for touch screens with support for receipt printers, customer displays, barcode scanners, scales, etc
- Localized into English, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician.
- It written in Java, using Swing and it runs in any operating system that supports Java (Linux, Windows, etc).
- Openbravo has acquired LibrePos and will backup LibrePos development, allowing it to grow up quickly. LibrePOS supports synchronization with Openbravo ERP.
- Started on January 2005. Near 100.000 accumulated downloads since then. It has been in the #17 position at SourceForge ranking.
- There are installations of LibrePos in Spain, USA, Chine, Kenya, Netherlands, Canada, Honduras, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Romania, Italy, Portugal, among others.
- Future development: customer module (loyalty module, discounts), employees module (shift management), Restaurant module (kitchen printers, handhelds).

Tomorrow we will continue the Openbravo Get Together meeting with the technology day.

Related blog posts
Note: After the Openbravo Get Together finishes we will publish all the presentations in the main openbravo.com site.

Thursday, October 4, 2007

Matt Asay, keynote speaker at Openbravo Get Together

It has been confirmed just a few hours ago. Open source guru Matt Asay will be giving the inaugural keynote speech at the Openbravo Get Together event in Barcelona, Spain, which will take place from October 26th to 28th. His presentation ‘Community Capitalism: The Art of Corporate Involvement in Open Source Communities’ will take place on Saturday the 27th at 10:00 a.m. The keynote will identify the most successful mechanisms that commercial open source vendors and community open source projects have found to improve the depth and breadth of their communities, as well as how end users can derive significant benefits from participating in and contributing to relevant open source communities.

Matt Asay has ten years’ operational experience working with commercial open source technology, and regularly speaks and publishes on emerging open source business strategies and opportunities. He is considered one of the industry’s leading open source business strategists and is a prolific blogger on open source, where he is a regular contributor to ZDNet and CNET. Asay co-founded Novell's Linux Business Office in 2002 and was an early agitator and architect for the company's shift to open source. He is currently the VP Business Development of open source content management vendor Alfresco, a board member at Open Source Initiative and advisor of several leading open source vendors.

Please, for those that are willing to attend any conference in the event, please remember to register in here. Since Saturday and Sunday are open and free attendance days and capacity is limited early registration will guarantee a place for you in the event.

Hope to see you in there ;-)

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Openbravo community highlights 2nd of October

Hello everybody,

There are some news that happened during the past weeks:
  • Openbravo product roadmap has been updated. It reflects the major releases that we are planing to produce.
  • We have started to collect feedback about how to improve our Wiki that is currently our main point for documentation. Check the ideas that we have until now and feel free to include yours.
  • In the last weeks we have released the localizations for Australia and Brazil. Localizations for Galicia, France, Iran, South Africa have some results published that you can start to test them (they are in Subversion since they are not released yet) and help to enhance their quality giving your feedback.
  • In the documentation front there are lots of news thanks to the many contributions that we are getting:
    • A German and Spanish specific documentation sections on the Wiki that collect all the documentation available for Openbravo on those languages.
    • User Migration guide for Openbravo R2.3, that explains the User Interface differences between the Openbravo 2.33 version and the previous versions.
    • Rapid Openbravo Development using Eclipse IDE, that explains how to setup an Openbravo development environment using Eclipse.
    • A little setup guide, that explains how to quickly setup Openbravo for a production environment.
    • A document that explains how to define new Skins (look and feel) for Openbravo.
    • Many contributors new to source control systems have not used Subversion before. We created a document that explains how to use Subversion in the Openbravo project.
That's all for now. If you have any news regarding Openbravo success or efforts, please let me know (jmas at openbravo.com)

Sunday, September 9, 2007

Openbravo GetTogether meeting in Barcelona October 26-28

These are very exciting times for Openbravo project. After the launch of Openbravo R2.3 with an improved user interface, a revamped look and feel and lots of new features we got very good feedback from media, community and costumers. We are going to release Openbravo R2.34 very soon that also will address many of the suggestions that we have received. Thanks to all for your cooperation!

Openbravo activity is growing very fast in all fronts and we have thought that will be very good to get together for two days and share experiences, ideas from all of you.

During October 27-28 we are holding the Openbravo GetTogether community days in Barcelona, Spain. This is an informal meeting free of access to everyone. On the 26th there is a meeting for Openbravo partners only.

We welcome to the community days all the different people on the Openbravo ecosystem: developers, consultants, users, companies, partners, and newcomers. The objective of the event is get all together and share experiences around Openbravo ERP technology. We also welcome people from other open source projects.

Meet with the main Openbravo developers, learn about our plans for the future, Openbravo success cases and how to make business and do successfully implementations.

If you are going to attend, we have information about estimated cost of flights, accommodation, visa requirements and other information that you may find useful.

We encourage everyone to propose presentations, success cases, round tables or key note speakers. Please, send you ideas to the forum thread created for this event.

We will keep you posted with news and the updates of the schedule in the next days.

See you all in Barcelona!

Note: Please, make sure that you register in the event using the registration form.

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Openbravo developments for next weeks

A few people has been asking us different questions about which our actual direction is in terms of product, roadmap, database model, so. Let me summarize some areas that we at Openbravo are focusing in the next couple of weeks:
  • Next version of Openbravo is going to be Openbravo R2.34. It is currently scheduled for end of September. We will be publishing upgrade scripts and we will recommend this version for production environments. This version will be focus on providing bug fixes for know issues. If you are working with Openbravo R2.33 and are you are experiencing a bug, check if has been already ready reported, and if not read our bug reporting guidelines and report it to us. We need your collaboration to make the next version rock solid!
  • Roadmap update. Paolo Juvara has already started a process to collect feedback from our community in terms of which areas of the product will you like to see enhancements and which areas we you like us to focus. We will use this feedback to set our roadmap for the next couple of months. Please, if you have ideas or comments for Openbravo ERP, let us know.
  • Documentation. As you probably have seen we have updated Openbravo User Manual to version 2.3, we are working on a Developer's Manual, the E/R data model and other related documents. Our most important goal in terms of documentation is to keep updating our current documentation and work to enhance it and publish a complete configuration manual (there is a tentative index available). We are aware that documenting Openbravo configuration will lower the entry barrier for newcomers.
  • We are currently working on moving from a single binary database dump file to a system that will allow to define our data model in different separate files. This is very important because will make possible to isolate changes in the data model and will permit to leverage bug fixes more easily between different versions of Openbravo. Adrián Romero has already started a public discussion about the best of way of addressing this issue. If you have comments or ideas, please let us know.
  • Many people asks when it will be possible to build Openbravo ERP from sources using PostgreSQL (right now can only be done using Oracle). This is closely related to the previous point of moving away from a single database dump. This is a priority for us and we hope to have it ready soon.
  • Openbravo Green. We are very excited about it and we have received some great comments on the initial designs. We will be updating our roadmap for it for the next couple of months but currently we are devoting our senior development staff to the Openbravo R2.3x branch, to make sure that we are delivering matches people's expectations in terms of functionality and quality.
  • We are defining our release policy for Openbravo. Our objective is to have more regular builds to involve the community better and also to make more clear which versions we recommend for production and which ones for testing. We will be sharing a proposal with everyone very soon. Also, we will be publish the scripts for our installers to make people build their installers.
We are working hard to make all of these points a reality, however our resources are limited. If you can commit resources in terms of helping in these areas your help is very welcome.

If you have any other specific question, please do not hesitate to ask us posting in this forum thread.

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Openbravo community highlights 3rd of August 2007

Hello everybody,

Openbravo R2.33 has just been released. You can already download it or try the on-line demo. We have been working very hard to make this version rock solid. R2.33 contains many new features and bug fixes, including a complete review of the English and Spanish terminology and language used in the application (see this post and English_Language_Changes_OBR23.zip).

We also have defined the criteria for releasing Openbravo builds, that is, the list of tests performed by Openbravo every time that a release is packaged from the SVN tree.

There are also more news that happened during the past weeks:
  • There is a new document at Openbravo Wiki that explains how to create new looks and feel for Openbravo.
  • We have created the Openbravo technical specifications that explain the technologies used and requiered by Openbravo ERP.
  • Daniel Hukkelhoven from Dalox has published a draft version of the char of accounts for Netherlands. Any feedback is welcome.
One of the important areas that we are still working is moving from our current database dump file system to a new approach where we have the data model separated in different files. This is will greatly improve our version control capabilities and will make more easy for people to leverage patches between different versions. There is a forum thread where we are discussing the best approach.

That's all for now. If you have any news regarding Openbravo success or efforts, please let me know (jmas at openbravo.com)

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Openbravo at OSCON 2007

This week Fernando Iriazabal (Openbravo developer), Ismael Ciordia (Openbravo CTO) and Jordi Mas (me) will be travelling to the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (23 of July - 27 of July) in Portland, Oregon. We will be joining the 2500 participants that are attending this year. During the first two days we will be in Open Solutions Alliance stand (participating in their interoperability hack-a-thon) in the exhibitors area with other Openbravo folks and OSA members and from Wednesday we will be attending the sessions and meeting other open source companies and people.

If you want to meet us just come to the OSA stand in the OSCON exhibitor area and ask for any us. We will see you there!

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Second phase: vote Openbravo in SourceForge 2007 Community Choice Awards

Thanks to everyone that helped to nominate Openbravo ERP for the Best Project, Most Collaborative Project and Best Project for the Enterprise categories in the SourceForge 2007 Community Choice Awards. We also to congratulate to all the other projects that got also nominated!

Now the second phase has started and the voting period is open until the 20th of July to choose between the nominated projects the ones that will win in their categories.


Please consider voting for Openbravo ERP project under the Best Project, Most Collaborative Project and Best Project for the Enterprise categories. You have to be a registered SourceForge user to be able to vote. Thanks for your support!

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Openbravo community highlights 19th of June 2007

Hello everybody,

There are some news that happened during the past weeks:
  • Joannès Vermorel informs me that Lokad has added support for Openbravo ERP. Lokad is an online time-series forecast that provides demand forecasting, inventory planning, staff scheduling and capacity optimization.
  • A few people from the Openbravo community have been requesting us to add support in our installers for new platforms. Last week we published the Openbravo R2.22 installers for FreeBSD 6, Linux 64-bits, Solaris Intel and Solaris SPARC.
  • We have started to build a list of special requirements needed in certain regions and countries for ERP systems that may require custom development of Openbravo. This list is aim to help other localizers to identify similar issues in their regions and to collect information about international requirements that may be added in future versions of Openbravo. Please, if you are aware of special needs that Openbravo may need to operate in your region or country added them to list.

That's all for now. If you have any news regarding Openbravo success or efforts, please let me know (jmas at openbravo.com)

Friday, June 15, 2007

Openbravo ERP R2.30 news and updated roadmap

After much effort we have released Openbravo R2.30 alpha version (only with Oracle support for this alpha). A preview version to show what we have been working on the last months. 2.30 alpha had 3.000 downloads in less than two weeks and Openbravo ERP project has been ranked #2 top project in SourceForge since its launch. The new version introduces many new features (like JasperReports integration) and a complete and sexy new look.


Our current tentative schedule for version R2.30 is to release a beta version before the end of June and a final R2.30 version during the first two weeks of July.

We have also updated our roadmap for the next months to accommodate the needs that our users have been pointing out and rescheduled it according to the resources that we have available.

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Vote Openbravo for Best Software and Best Software for the Enterprise on SourceForge 2007 Community Choice Awards

Today SourceForge has started the voting for the SourceForge 2007 Community Choice Awards. Openbravo has been hosting its project at SourceForge since April 2006.

From the SourceForge web site you can read:
"The SourceForge.net team is proud to present our second annual Community Choice Awards. Winners are selected by community members like you, and it's that time again! Cast a ballot for your favorite projects now and make your voice heard."
The awards will be given to the winning projects on the 26st of July during the Open Source Convention in Porland.

During the last year we have been working very hard pushing a very ambitious roadmap, opening up our development process, creating documentation (user, developers manuals, and dozens of technical notes), reviewing Openbravo accounting system or designing a new user interface.

Our community has taken the important responsibility of localizating Openbravo to 24 countries making it ready for those countries, giving support to new and already exiting users through our forums, localizing materials to different languages, reporting loads of bugs and enhancements ideas or launching initiatives like Openbravofans in China.


Please consider voting for the Openbravo ERP project under the Best Project for Enterprise category and the Best Project. You have to be a registered SourceForge user to be able to vote.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Openbravo workshop in LinuxTag to review the German localization

Jens Wilke (from Headissue GmbH) has organised a workshop next Thursday, 31 of May in the LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany.

As you know Jens Wilke and Birgit Matthaei have been doing an extraordinary work localizing Openbravo for Germany. They have already a translation into German language (except for the Help file) and also a beta version of the an account of charts file for Germany.

Jens will give a short introduction to Openbravo and gives a status of the ongoing German localization effort. After that a discussion is planed to brainstorm what adoptions and functionality is important for Germany (such as electronic tax filing) and what the (German) users expect from the system.

Everyone is invited to participate and give a feedback on who to prioritize and organize the further activities. If you are working on other Openbravo localization, feel also free to show up and comment with us how is your effort going.

More details: Openbravo ERP - Einführung und Status der deutschen Anpassung

Sunday, May 20, 2007

More resources for developers

We are very excited. In the next few days Openbravo R2.30 beta version is going to be released. It is going to be an important milestone for our users and developers, introducing among others, a new user interface.

Since the beginning we envision Openbravo as a web based ERP and also as a platform capable of developing web-based applications following a MDD/MVC architecture completely decoupled from the ERP.

Last week we published Openbravo Entity-Relationship (E/R) database diagram, a fundamental tool for those willing to customize Openbravo for their needs or for people willing to develop verticals or do custom development. The E/R diagram provides a clear picture of how Openbravo functionality is related to the data model.

Also, another important document that has entered a beta from this week is Openbravo Developers Manual. As the name indicates, its aim is to provide a full reference for those interested in new Openbravo functionalities, verticals or customizations for specific customer needs. We really appreciate any feedback on these documents.

And finally, we have updated the look of Openbravo Wiki, the central point to obtain documentation for Openbravo project.

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Happy birthday Openbravo community

Openbravo started under the name of Tecnicia S.L back in 2001. At the time, the company was looking for an open-source web-based ERP for its customers. Since no suitable solution was found, we started to build our own solution based on another ERP called Compiere, that was available only as a Java client at the time.

From 2003 and until 2006 five people worked full time on the project (the team grew to 11 people by that time) developing new functionality for customers of different business sectors. During the that time the source code was delivered to our customers.

At the beginning of 2006, Openbravo secured an investment of 5 million Euros with the public venture capital fund Sodena. The objective was to build the best open source web based ERP and become an international player.

On April 18th 2006 Openbravo announced the release of Openbravo ERP R2.0 and published the source code at SourceForge. We started opening our development process using the bug tracking, source control and public forums at SourceForge to carry out our development.

During the first three months of public live of Openbravo one of the most recurrent requests that we received was to add support for PostgreSQL database engine. After a few months of work and as an answer to our community requests we released a new version of Openbravo with support for PostgreSQL database.

On September 2006, just five months after publishing the project at SourceForge, the project was ranked project number 6 in SourceForge ranking. That month, Openbravo ERP had 18.128 downloads and 420 messages in its forums, showing the growing interest for Openbravo.

Since the beginning we believed that all the documentation of our project had to be libre and free. The initial documentation was published in SourceForge but after a few months we launched the Openbravo Wiki that helped to vertebrate the collaboration efforts around of our project. Also, helped to vertebrate the localization of this documents to other languages like Spanish and Chinese.

We kept working on opening our development making our roadmap publically available, letting people to prioritize it, setting up a IRC channel to ease the communication between community members, setting up our own Planet and publishing for discussing Openbravo Green, our next platform generation.

On St. Valentine's Day of this year, the Open Solutions Alliance was presented. Openbravo is a founder member and it has been working since its conception in establishing synergies with other projects and open communities.

Last April, one year after of our debut in SourceForge, the statistics for that month were respectable: 72 bugs opened (44 closed), 488 messages in our forums, 22.775 downloads (6.681 product downloads), 21 registered localizations of which four projects are completed.

What are the challenges for next year? Keep building the participation and communication channels and the necessary infrastructure to encourage the steady growth of our community.

Let's make it happen!

Thursday, May 3, 2007

Openbravo community highlights 3rd of May 2007

Hello everybody,

There are some news that happened during the past days:
  • raulcosminm has published the Chart of Accounts for Romania. If you live in Romania please help us to test the new localization.

  • Rok Lenardic has been working on a document that explain how to install Openbravo from the command line on Fedora. It is going to be extended to support Debian installations soon.
That's all for now. If you have any news regarding Openbravo success or efforts, please let me know (jmas at openbravo.com)

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Openbravo community highlights 12th of April 2007

Hello everybody,

There are some news that happened during the past days:
  • Jens Wilke and Birgit Matthaei have almost completed the localization of the German version (except for the Help file) including an account of charts file for Germany. They are looking for feedback of their work.
  • Due to popular demand, we now have a new page at the Wiki explaining how to translate documentation to other languages. This allows to localize Openbravo Wiki content, like the user manual or the installation instructions, into other languages.
  • Dejinlee, Xin.lv and LinuxWind are leading the translation of the Openbravo user manual into Simplified Chinese. They already have made some nice progress.
  • We have also opened a new Chinese support forum that we hope will complement the excellent job done by the Openbravofans project.
  • Patrick Beaucamp from BPM Conseil has put together a proposal for Dataware house integration with Openbravo ERP. Any feedback or comments are welcome.
  • I send a proposal to translate the user manual into Spanish. ¿Alguien se anima?
That's all for now. If you have any news regarding Openbravo success or efforts, please let me know (jmas at openbravo.com)

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Openbravo community highlights 29th of March 2007

Hello everybody,

There are some news that happened during the past days:
  • We have updated our product roadmap. Release 2.30 has been delayed a bit but new functionality is going to be included. Also we have detailed the roadmap for Openbravo R.2 until the end of the year and we have give more details about the current roadmap for Openbravo R3 (the new platform due mid 2008). Soon, we will publish new details of the new platform and ask everyone in the community for feedback.
  • We have finished documenting the localisation of Openbravo using PO files. This new way of translating the application (is still possible to use XML) makes more easy the translation and allows to leverage all the popular tools that support PO format.
That's all for now.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

See you at Cebit

Openbravo is going to be this year at Cebit in Hannover, Germany. Cebit is the largest computer tradeshow in the world with around 700.000 visitors. Cebit starts on the 15th of March and ends on the 21st.

Openbravo stand is located at Hall 5 Booth No: F 58/2. (in the Linux park area).

If you want to discuss any localization or community issue, I'm going to be in our stand from Monday 19th until Wednesday 21st of March. Looking forward to talk to you there.

Thursday, March 8, 2007

Openbravo community highlights 9th of March 2007

Hello everybody,

There are some news that happened during the past days:
  • Dai Bo, Xin.Lv, Jeff Wang and Fat Dog and another contributors around the openbravofans.net community have completed the Chinese localization of Openbravo. This is the second localization completed by the Openbravo community and the fourth available for Openbravo ERP (also available in English, Spanish and Italian). You can get it from our download area.
  • We have started a Wiki page where we are collecting project ideas for people that wants to start contributing to Openbravo. Do you have more ideas? Do you want to lead some of the projects? Let us know through our developers forum.
  • Matt Asay at Infoworld is running a story about Openbravo commenting in his success at Sourceforge and Matt's vision of ERP market.
That's all folks!

Monday, February 26, 2007

Openbravo community highlights 26/02/2007

Hello everybody,

There are some news that happened during the past days:
  • Miguel Armas from CanaryTek has updated our pre-installed and pre-configured application Virtual appliances to Openbravo version 2.22. They are available from SourceForge. There also step by step on-line instructions.
  • I have been working on Openbravo documentation style guide. It does attempt nor desire to cover all aspects of technical writing. The objective is to be concise and focused for Openbravo documentation writers. Please, feel free to give suggestions or comments in our documentation forum. I also have created a small Help page explaining how to edit documents our Wiki.
  • Some community members in the Spanish support forum are starting an effort to document Openbravo processes and workflows. There is an early draft is already published.
Also in case the you missed Earthweb has an interesting article Ten Leading Open Source Innovators about companies that are innovative. Not all of them are open source or innovating so much but still very interesting.

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Openbravo community highlights 17/02/2007

This is the first of a series of posts that I will write regularly to highlight the news and accomplishments around the Openbravo community.

Some recent news:

  • Openbravo roadmap has been updated and extended a few days back providing extra detail on new features. You are welcome to give your feedback in our developers forum.
  • Our engineering team have been successfully tested Openbravo on Microsoft Windows Vista and Java 6.
  • The III Libro blanco de software libre en España (3rd white book on free software in Spain) was presented last week. Openbravo was invited to write an article about "Creating Value" in open source companies.
  • Decio Franchin, a student mastering at Bournemouth University in UK, is requesting help for his research around the viability of ERPs for SME. Can you help him?

I will try to keep this compilation rolling every week. Feel free to send me achievements that you have done around Openbravo.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Knock Knock

This my first post from Blogger. At Openbravo I'm in charge of our community services. This new channel will help us to communicate to everyone our progress and get direct feedback from the community.

For any comment or suggestion I'm always available at jmas at openbravo.com

Regards