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.

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.

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).

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.