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.

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

• Openbravo Get Together - Blogging After the First Session
• Running the open-source bulls with Openbravo

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

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 ;-)

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)