Packt Publishing is looking for an Openbravo ERP book author

The book publisher Packt Publishing is looking for an individual or a group of people that can write a book in English about Openbravo ERP. Their idea is to produce an introductory book that covers the main aspects of Openbravo ERP functionality, installation, configuration and customization. This can be of great help to newcomers to the Openbravo ecosystem.

Packt Publishing specializes in Information Technology and has boasts a large collection of publications in the area of Open Source and open technologies. Its books have a practical approach and focus on sharing the experiences of your fellow IT professionals in adapting and customizing today's application.

If you are interested or you require further details please contact Packt Publishing.

Openbravo World Conference call for papers opens

The Openbravo World Conference is an initiative put forth to share and fuel the growth of the professional open source space, namely in the Openbravo ERP technology. We will be welcoming to the community days (18th and 19th of April 2009) all those belonging to the Openbravo ecosystem: community member such as developers, customers, partners, and also newcomers. The access to the two community days will be free and will only require previous registration, which is now open. Make sure to reserve your place soon as space is limited.

As an open source project, Openbravo has always relied on contributions to increase its value, and this Conference is no different. That is why we strongly encourage interested parties in contributing to this event by presenting their expertise to an audience of 300 professionals involved in the field of open source ERPs.

The call for papers is now open until January 31st, 2009. This is a great opportunity to share your vision and experience relating to the following topics with the Openbravo community:

* Openbravo projects’ future direction
* How to extend Openbravo project functionality
* How to boost collaborations and contributions within the Openbravo ecosystem
* Migration from closed source ERP into Openbravo
* Experiences in the area of localization
* Integration with third party software
* Best practices around Openbravo ERP and POS
* Unusual deployments of Openbravo ERP and POS


Presentations can either be 30-minute sessions (Q&A included) or can have a round table format. As you know, all of these are very important issues for the Openbravo community. We invite everybody to participate by sending us your ideas using the call-for-papers-form.

The proposal selection criteria will be the following:

* Adequate for the conference audience
* Focussing on Openbravo products
* Professionally written and presented
* Providing value to the attendees

We recommend to keep these in mind when preparing your proposals. Do not hesitate to contact me (jmas at openbravo.com) if you have any questions or suggestions.

We will also have a session dedicated to Openbravo Success Stories, so if you currently use or have implemented Openbravo ERP or POS, we want to hear from you!

For further details such as the Agenda and Keynote Speakers, please consult the Openbravo World Conference microsite.

New category classifications for the Openbravo Wiki

Since its launch, the Openbravo Wiki has been growing steadily. In the last six months the documents published went from 600 to 1040 (as of today). Openbravo Wiki has more than 22.000 unique visitors and 200.000 page views per month. It has become the place of reference for Openbravo documentation sharing, development status and processes.

As a result of this growth, we need to review our categorization policy. Some of the categories contain over 200 articles, which makes it hard to use. When the Wiki was launched, Openbravo POS was not part of Openbravo's portfolio and was never accommodated properly in the Wiki categorization. Additionally, the number of translated documents has also been growing significantly, requiring a new taxonomy to allow them to be on par with those in the English language.

For all these reasons, we have put together a new taxonomy proposal for Openbravo Wiki which aims to fix all these problems. We will move from a flat category structure to a taxonomy with subcategories, and more importantly, the new taxonomy will set the foundation for keeping our Wiki growing while efficiently classifying our content for our users' benefit. We are going to recategorize more than 1.000 documents to accommodate the new category system.

Please let us know if you have comments on the new category proposal, whether you would like to see new categories, or any other suggestion that you may have.

Meritocracy levels in Openbravo ERP and POS projects

In the Openbravo Manifesto that we published in April this year, Openbravo as company leading Openbravo ERP and POS projects committed to a few principles, including meritocracy. Quoting the manifest:

We believe we should gain people's respect and recognition due to our work. We shall always make sure that everybody has access to our open resources on an equal basis and we will accept contributors based on the merit of their work and their skills.

Today we present our meritocracy policy that has the objective of building a meritocracy access system based on community members' reputation. The levels are based on people's technical abilities, skills and shown responsibility. The role names are built on the name of the (b) mark, which we pronounce "obi" (as in letter "o" and letter "b"). On top of providing more responsibility and rights to different services, these levels would be highly visibly and an important indicator of the contributor's reputation within the Openbravo ERP and POS communities.

In the future, these levels will be precomputed automatically from the different Openbravo collaboration sites. Until, this is done, we do maintain the list manually, if you think that you are entitled to be listed please do not hesitate to contact me (jmas at openbravo.com)

Help us to get better participating in the Community Hurdle Assessment

We have started an initiative to identify the main barriers that people face when joining the Openbravo community and to spot areas of enhancement that can increase Openbravo ERP success.

If you are new to the Openbravo community and you are interested in helping us please check the Community Hurdle Assessment page that contains all the details. Contributing to this initiative you can make Openbravo ERP community an easier place to work with and reduce the entrance barrier of future contributors.

Please, feel free to contact me directly at jmas at openbravo.com if you have any doubt or your are interested in participating. Openbravo will also give a 150 euro Amazon gift certificate to the participants that complete the assessment.

Openbravo ERP community and academia institutions

Universities have played a very significant role in the development of the Internet and open source. Some of the basic technologies in the open source space, such as the BSD based operating systems, the X-Window graphical system and many others, have been developed and improved in universities. Openbravo ERP is an open community which strives to maximize collaboration and welcomes contributions from the academia world.

At Openbravo, we have crafted a program aimed to help academia institutions to embrace the teaching and contribution to Openbravo ERP. We think that this program can help students to develop their domain of knowledge in the ERP space, gain experience in contributing within open source communities, experience in distributed software development, and in the use of tools used in business environments. In the other side, we expect them to to produce deliverables that are usable in the Openbravo ERP project.

If you are responsible for a program in an academic institution and you have interest in participating in this program, please contact us at collaborate_AT_openbravo.com. Openbravo offers a framework agreement for academia institutions willing to participate.

More information at Openbravo Wiki.

New Openbravo ERP and POS forums to discuss how to contribute

A few days back Carlos Romero was talking about how contributing to Openbravo projects is a win - win proposition. A clear example of this is how the 21 localizations projects that have produced deliverables are benefiting the whole community. In our Contributor's guides for Openbravo ERP and for POS there are more examples of areas where people are actually contributing.

We regularly receive requests asking how people can help Openbravo projects, how they can coordinate with the quality assurance or development teams, how they add a new feature, etc. To easy these conversations we have opened two new forums: Contributing to Openbravo ERP and Contributing to Openbravo POS. The objective of these forums is to provide a place were people can discuss these ideas publically and have more visibility on how they can contribute to Openbravo projects.

Do not hesitate to visit the forums if you have any question or suggestion regarding how to contribute.

Openbravo ERP Java libraries updated

I have been working on the past weeks on the library auditing project. Yesterday all changes were merged into trunk.

As part of the project, I have removed some duplicated libraries that we had in the project, reducing the final size of openbravo.war from 96MB to 46MB. I also also updated the rest of the libraries, as result now we are using JasperReports 3.0, something requested for a long time, and also the latest versions of the database access drivers. David Baz is also working on updating the Dojo Javascript library to the latest version too.

All of these enhancements are going to be part for Openbravo ERP 2.50. If you find any issue with the updated libraries, just let me know (jmas at openbravo.com).

Openbravo World Conference April 17-19, 2009 in Barcelona

The Openbravo World Conference's is an initiative put forth to share and fuel the growth of the professional open source space, namely in the Openbravo ERP technology. It distinguishes itself from its predecessors by putting a strong effort on third party contributions, such as from other open source projects, through a call-for-papers process, therefore covering a larger scope of Openbravo Community's interests. We will be welcoming to the community days (18th and 19th) all those belonging to the Openbravo ecosystem: developers, consultants, users, companies, partners, and newcomers. The access to the two community days will be free and will only require previous registration (registration will open in December 2008). Also, there will be a day reserved for Openbravo partners on Friday April 17th.

Throughout Openbravo’s World Conference, you will be able to meet with the main Openbravo developers and leaders, learn about our plans for the future, share and listen to Openbravo success cases as well as how to make business and complete successful implementations. We are building a program for the largest gathering of Openbravo ERP & POS developers, users and partners that will reflect Openbravo projects’ wide-ranging appeal and capabilities. The goal of the conference is to provide an open forum for ERP professionals and enthusiasts to explore and create the best solutions, getting first hand information from key Openbravo developers and other field experts.

The call for papers for the community days will open to everyone on the 1st of December of 2008. We will publishing a list of topics that we consider hot for this year and also the papers acceptance criteria.

We will keep you posted, namely through the event micro-site which will be launched in the fall. Please, do not hesitate to contact me (jmas at openbravo.com) if you have any questions or suggestions.

Why Open source is good according to Google

Today the Internet is thrilled by the imminent launch of a new web browser from Google called Chrome. More details will follow during today but it looks like is going bring more innovation to the web browser space, something like another open source product called Firefox already did in the usability and extensibility area.

A comic from Scott McCloud illustrates the motivations behind Google Chrome and explains why going open source for this product was the right decision from a Google perspective.
Reproduced under a Creative Commons license

Google focuses on why open source is good from a product perspective, mainly because it boosts collaborative efforts and helps to drive innovation.

At Openbravo we think the same. That is the reason why we sponsor a large part of the development of Openbravo POS and ERP and the infrastructure that makes them possible. We are also looking forward to introduce Openbravo ERP R2.50 which will bring a stronger product modularity, something that will be key to allowing to build an ecosystem of solutions around OpenbravoERP.

A new Openbravo Wiki main page rolls out

After a few weeks of work we are very excited to present our new homepage for the Openbravo Wiki.

One of the objectives of the new design was to give its own entity and weight to the Openbravo POS project. This project joined the Openbravo family when the Wiki was already working. In the recent months, Openbravo POS documentation has been growing and required a more nicer fit. Now, when you enter the main page you have two tabs that allow you to switch the content for both projects.

Openbravo Wiki is currently the main entrance to our community with currently 20.715 unique visitors (July 2008) and experiencing a steady monthly grow of 10%. We wanted to give more visibility to other news that happen around the project every week like the blogging and the Subversion activity.

We have a new 'Editorial content' area that will help us to highlight these important issues that have occurred around the project. On the bottom of the page, you have the new collaboration area where you have the fundamental links for these interested in start contributing to the project.

Gil Forcada has been also working on enhancing our documentation for the Wiki and establishing guidelines for the style and the content. Very soon he will be sharing with us some examples of how we can do better documents in the Wiki.

If you have suggestions for improvement let us know.

News from the Openbravo ERP localization front

In the last days many things regarding Openbravo ERP localization have occurred that we would like to share with you:

• Openbravo ERP R2.40 beta was released last week. The estimated effort of updating the translations from Openbravo ERP R2.3x to Openbravo ERP 2.40 is 5.000 words. This is a two days work effort of a full time translation. Rafa Roda, from Openbravo S.L, has already updated the Spanish localization to version 2.40. Starting from Openbravo R2.40 the only language pack that is included by default in Openbravo ERP is English. Spanish language, can be downloaded from SourceForge and installed like the rest of the additional languages.
  
  
• Phil Heenan has been working on Openbravo2PO as part of a more ambitious plan of enhancing the whole translation process for Openbravo ERP. Phil has already asked for feedback on his enhancements for the process. As result of his work, Openbravo2PO is now the tool that we recommend for translating Openbravo ERP and PO the recommended format. Openbravo2PO has been already used successfully in the German, Italian and Spanish translation efforts.
  
  
• Eduardo Argal (ear at openbravo dot com) is the new localization coordinator at Openbravo replacing me in this role. He is part of the localization Openbravo team and has a great experience in accounting and localization. If you have any questions regarding localization we recommend to use Openbravo ERP localization forum.
  
  
• Kenzo Repole, the localizer for Saudia Arabia, has been working on adding RTL (right-to-left) support for Openbravo. This will be part of Openbravo ERP R2.50. If you are interested in helping us in enhancing RTL support please contact Eduardo Argal (ear at openbravo dot com).
  

That's all for now.

Openbravo POS packages for OpenSuse and Fedora

Using the wonderful Opensuse build service I have built a set of packages for OpenSuse and Fedora. You can download them from:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/openbravo/

The packages for Fedora should work well under CentOS and Red Hat. You have the source code of the packages available and also a bug report with some know issues.

Please, let me know if you have any issue installing these packages.

Notice that these provided as they are. Use at your own risk.

Fourth community chat meeting on 18th of June at 14.00 GMT: the roadmap discussion

As many of you already know, we are having bimonthly community chat meetings.

The sole objective is this chat meeting is to discuss with you our planed roadmap. Some of the discussion already has started in our forums following Paolo's call for your feedback.

If you are planning to develop a module or feature for Openbravo this is a good opportunity also to synchronize efforts.

Here you have all the information for the fourth meeting:

Date: 18th of June at 14.00 GMT
Where: IRC Network FreeNode at the #openbravo channel
Language: English

Please, if you are planning to attend it is important that you add your name to the chat meeting web page. If you are not familiar with the chats, we have a Wiki page that explains how to setup the software and get connected.

Openbravo community survey results

Thanks to the many people that participated on the first Openbravo community survey.

I would like to share with you some of the main conclusions:

· 50.77% of respondents work for micro SME companies
· 47,69% of respondents are people related to information technology or software developers
· 52.31% of respondents have have less than 1 year of experience using ERPs
· 33.85% of respondents never worked in an open source community before
· The main areas of planned contributions of the respondents are participating in the forums and doing localizations
· 81.54% of of respondents use PostgreSQL

These results helps us to better understand the background and objectives of our community members.

Regarding Openbravo ERP product feedback, we got the following results (been 5 the maximum):

· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's extensibility capabilities? 3,2 (Absolute deviation 0,82)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's customisation capabilities? 3,35 (Absolute deviation 0,96)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's installation? 3,31(Absolute deviation 0,98)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's functionality? 3,55 (Absolute deviation 0,67)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's documentation? 2,5 (Absolute deviation 1,04)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's quality? 3,45 (Absolute deviation 0,81)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's performance? 3,16 (Absolute deviation 0,81)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's ease of use? 3,29 (Absolute deviation 1,00)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's ease of contributing? 3,17 (Absolute deviation 0,86)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's business value? 3,73 (Absolute deviation 0,73)
· How do you rate your overall satisfaction with Openbravo ERP's? 3,56 (Absolute deviation 0,8)

I would like to comment on some of these results:

· Installation used to be a major area of complaints for Openbravo ERP due to the number of components that are part of his stack and are needed to run the application. The installation process was enhanced when we licensed BitRock technology for Openbravo installers. We created also more documentation for the installation process, that many people helped us to enhance. The use of virtual images for evaluation also helped to easy the evaluation process. With Openbravo 2.40 we have fixed many small issues with the installer, that should help to rise the user's level of satisfaction.

· We know that documentation is a weak point of the product. Openbravo has been lately working a lot on this area and the community has played an important role. We have recently opened a full time position to put our documentation in good shape.

· We are very happy with the product quality results of the survey. There is no doubt that this has been one of the major areas of improvement during last year. Much better processes in place, the acceptance test or the opening of the Quality Assurance to our community. We are already in the process to deploy a more powerful bug tracking system that will allow us have a better control on Quality Assurance issues. We invite you to participate in the Quality Assurance efforts and assure that the bugs that are critical for you get fixed.

· Regarding extensibility capabilities that is going to be one of the major areas of improvements for Openbravo 2.50, specially on terms of plugins, verticals and its packing. We will shortly be sharing our plans regarding this.

· Regarding easy of contributing is something that we have still to work hard. We have the contributor's guide and some good process in place and a Forge collaboration platform coming in the next months, but still there are many things to do.

That's all for now. If you have any comments or suggestion please comment on!

3 days left to participate in the Community Survey

A few days ago, we launched our first Community Survey to better understand the background and objectives of our Community Members. We would really appreciate it if you could spend a couple of minutes filling the survey and giving us, in an anonymous format, some data points on your interests in the Openbravo projects.

The information collected is going to help us to prioritize our community activities, infrastructure investments and other aspects.

Go to http://openbravo.questionform.com/public/Openbravo-Community-Event-Survey and make your opinion count!

Thanks a lot for your help!

Openbravo Get Together June 21st and 22nd in Miami, United States

During June 21st and 22nd we will be holding the Openbravo Get Together in Miami, United States. The agenda is already available. There is a business day where you will get the insights of how to do business with Openbravo products and a technology day focus on Openbravo technology, product's roadmaps, localization and community services. The language of the event is English.

This is a great opportunity to learn about Openbravo products, do peer-to-peer networking and to share experiences with other Openbravo user's and developers. The Openbravo Get Together's are free and open to everyone, you only have to register. During this Get Together Brian Reale from Colosa Inc. will be visiting us and presenting the benefits of Colosa's open source workflow products and how they can add more value to Openbravo ERP implementations.

We are looking forward to meet you in Miami. If you have any suggestion or comment for this event please let us know.

Sharing Openbravo Code Snippets

Openbravo Community contributor Victor Gaspar published a few days back a message where he shared with the community how he has managed to customize Openbravo ERP for some of his specific needs. For some time now, we wanted to have a code snippets section in our Wiki. Code snippets are small pieces of reusable code, like small cooking recipes.

We have created a category in the Openbravo Wiki called Code Snippets to hold documents that contain these pieces of reusable code. If you have small samples of how to customize Openbravo, small changes to the code that you think that may be useful to other people, please create a new page on the Openbravo Wiki and add it to this new category. You can also use the template CodeSnippets, like it is done in the already existent documents, to provide information of your snippets in a structured way.

You can check Victor's snippets CustomRemittance, AddFieldWebService and PrintButton. If you need any help or assistance on this, please do not hesitate to write to the developer's forum.

Openbravo Manifesto

Last weekend during the Openbravo Get Together in Barcelona we presented the Openbravo Manifesto (which was published both in English and Spanish). For a long time, many of us at Openbravo S.L wanted to clarify the extent of our commitment to Openbravo ERP and POS projects, and open source in general; we also wanted to share our values and belief with our Community. Openbravo was born as an open source project and some of its values are deeply rooted in the company.

The manifesto highlights Openbravo's company values: transparency, openness, collaboration, meritocracy, leadership, excellence and gratitude. We strive to live and keep these values in mind in everything that we do.

Most importantly, the Manifesto also highlights Openbravo company's commitments towards our Community: open source availability, open access to the code under development, open documentation and effective project infrastructure. We are also committed to honor other people's rights by providing proper attribution to any contribution and respecting other people's intellectual property; at the same time, we are ready to defend our Community's investment into the project through legal means if necessary.

We believe that publishing this Manisfesto is very important step ahead, since Openbravo S.L is currently the main sponsor of Openbravo projects. Additionally, we are proud of being the first company of our category that makes a public statement about its commitments to his Community. This underscores our belief that, from the very first day, our Community has been and will continue to be the key to success for the Openbravo projects.

More help on the community front

Hello everyone. I just want to ask you to give a warm welcome to Gil Forcada. He has joined the community departament at Openbravo. He will help doing Wiki editing tasks, answering forums questions, doing administrative tasks and collecting our community statistics. Gil speaks English, Spanish and Catalan.

Gil has been a contributor to the GNOME project for a few years, helping on the Catalan localization effort and helping on organizing GUADEC, the GNOME community annual European meeting. On top of that, Gil has been a founder and very active member of guifi, an open and free wireless network focus on Catalonia with more than 4.000 access points. All the infrastructure has been based on Linux and other open source solutions.

If you attend to our next Get Together in Barcelona this weekend, you will have the opportunity to meet him personally.

Third chat community meeting summary

Today, 2nd of April 14.00 GMT, we had our third 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 35 participants and we talked for two hours. There is a full log available. You can use the Open Discussion forum or the appropriated forum for your topic if you want to comment something on what has been discussed or you still have a question that we could not answer at the time.

Some highlights from the meeting

Paolo Juvara explained what is the current status of the Openbravo ERP 2.40, building on his previous public comments, and highlighted some of the most significant features Openbravo Core:

1. Keyboard operation: his project not only provides shortcuts for all the functions in the system and allows its mouse-less operations; it also allows you to configure the default first field where the focus is placed when you navigate to a new record. We believe this will significantly reduce the number of clicks required to perform data entry.
2. UI feedback: this project will provide visual clues to the state of the system (record in edit mode, record in read only mode, processing, loading data, etc.).
3. Requisitions: this project significantly improves the Procurement footprint of Openbravo and enables enterprises to automate the buying process,from expression of demand to PO authoring. The Procurement flow is further improved with another small project that allows to simplify the receiving process by allow people to receive by PO number.
4. Multi-schema accounting: this capability allows you to account a single transaction multiple times, according to different account schemas.
   

In practice, this enables operating multi-national organizations with Openbravo where different organizations need to report to the local legal authorities plus the parent company.

Adrian Romero also commented on the future plans for Openbravo POS that are already on our roadmap, including, a new customer module with costumer and warehouse integration, support for skins and enhancements in the localization area.

We aim to schedule the next chat during May 2008. We will keep you posted.

Third community chat meeting on 2nd of April at 14.00 GMT

As many of you already know, we are having bimonthly community meetings. The objective is to discuss the topics that you consider important related to Openbravo ERP and Openbravo POS product and community processes.

Here you have all the information for the second meeting:

Date: 2nd of April at 14.00 GMT
Where: IRC Network FreeNode at the #openbravo channel
Language: English

Please, if you are planning 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. If you are not familiar with the chats, we have a Wiki page that explains how to setup the software and get connected.

Openbravo Conference and Get Together meetings during 2008

Last year we had the Openbravo Get Together. It was a great event with many people attending all over the world and, as a result, we have decided to increase the number of events we do with our community.

This year the main community meeting is called Openbravo Conference. This event aims to be the global event for the Openbravo Community. We are planning to organize a call for papers and enable sponsorship opportunities. Also we plan to open it more to products and technologies that we interoperate with and solutions built on top of Openbravo products. Openbravo Conference would be in Barcelona, Spain again and it would be during November 2008. We will be publishing the details before the summer.

Additionally, during 2008 we are going to have three shorter local community meetings. Two of them are already defined:

· 12th and 13rd of April 2008 in Barcelona, Spain in NH Master hotel.
· 21st and 22nd of June 2008 in Miami, United States.
· A third location to be determined before the end of the year.

The Openbravo Get Together's are free and open to everyone, you only have to register. These events will take place over the weekend and will be dedicated to get in touch with our local communities. We will have a more specific agenda during next days. We are calling these meetings Openbravo Get Together's because they would be a bit more informal and also shorter (two mornings) that the Openbravo Conference.

If you have any suggestion for these events or comment please let me know.

Openbravo community plans for 2008

Year 2007 has been a tremendous year for Openbravo. During this year we focused our community efforts on adopting the best processes and methodologies for Openbravo ERP development.

Our communication and transparency has been greatly enhanced including: publishing and updating our roadmaps, setting up IRC channels and having regular chat meetings, start using mailing lists or the blogging and Planet efforts. Another accomplishment has been in the documentation area. Openbravo ERP started as a home grown solution for enterprises and its documentation was modest. Openbravo community have been working hard on extending the Openbravo documentation. Still many efforts are necessary but a good progression is made every week.

During year 2008 we plan to focus on providing a better infrastructure for people developing Openbravo ERP and POS, and also, for people working on Openbravo related projects, like plugins, verticals or localizations.

Let me give you some highlights of our planned services:

• A better Wiki. Building on top of our Wiki we plan to add more exciting functionality: enable users to rate articles, activate the discussion pages to allow people to comment on already existing articles, a better category system, better integration with other Openbravo news sources using RSS.
• New forums. This is has been a long request from our community: to have a better and more powerful forum system.
• New bug tracking system. Our current bug tracking system at SourceForge has many limitations. We have been evaluating different solutions we would make a decision soon.
  
• Single sign for all the community services enabling users to authenticate once and gain access to the resources of multiple community systems.
• Openbravo Forge. Starting with Openbravo ERP R2.4x series, to be released in June 2008, it would be more easy to develop and deploy plugins, verticals and extensions. The objective of Openbravo Forge is to provide hosting services for projects of Openbravo contributors and to boost collaboration between the different efforts. Services like forums, source control, bug tracking, news publishing or file downloads would be provided.
  

This is the direction that we are working and we hope that it would happen during 2008. We are focusing first on the new bug tracking system and Wiki and then in the rest of the services. We ask you please to be patient. Any feedback on these plans this is really appreciated.

Anyone willing to provide additional services or resources to help to build our community is more than welcome.

Openbravo community highlights 25th of January

Hello everybody,

There are some news that happened during the past weeks:

• A new forum has been opened for the Openbravo community in Brazil. Many ideas have started to flow already and they have already started to work on translating the little setup guide to Brazilian Portuguese.
• We have updated the virtual appliances to Openbravo ERP 2.35 MP1. As usual they are available for Xen and VMWare and there are instructions in the Openbravo Wiki that explain how to use them.
• Asier Zabaleta has put together some documentation on how to quickly hack an Openbravo skin to change its default colors.
• We have created a new mailing list called openbravo-commits. Every commit to the openbravo Subversion repository generates an email showing who made the change, when they made it, what files and directories changed, and how they changed. Aside from the obvious technical benefits of peer review, very common in open source projects, commit emails help create a sense of community, because they establish a shared environment in which people can react to events (commits) that they know are visible to others as well.
• There is a also a new list called openbravo-development, that is a general development mailing list.
  

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

Second chat community meeting summary

Today, 22nd of January 14.00 GMT, we had our second 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 25 participants and we talked for two hours. There is a full log available. You can use the Open Discussion forum or the appropriated forum for your topic if you want to comment something on what has been discussed or you still have a question that we could not answer at the time.

Some highlights from the meeting:

· We comment on our test3 for localized chart of accounts that has been published recently. Previously published tests 1 and 2 verify that the initial client setup can be done correctly and test 3 verifies that balanced sheet is properly balanced.

· Regarding BI (business intelligence) . Openbravo ERP R2.40 does not include a BPM engine but we have an active project for BI. We are still not 100% positive that we will be able to make it in time and if not we would like to descope the feature but keep the schedule. In any case, we are very optimistic about BI. For BPM, we hope to make it in the next release 2.50, but as you know, we publish a road map for one release at a time, so no commitments.

· Openbravo POS. Version 2.0 is scheduled for mid February. There is a description of the bug fixes and new functionality available in the public roadmap. Currently Openbravo POS supports payment using magnetic cards but at this point there is no support for smart cards and payment gateways functionality has to be extended.

· Ricardo from Portugal was asking for SAT support in Openbravo ERP. There is already a message in the forums dicussing the issue and we have agreed to keep the discussion there.

We aim to schedule the next chat during March 2008. Our current tentative date is 18th of March 14.00 GMT. We will keep you posted.

Second community chat meeting on 22nd of January at 14.00 GMT

After our first community chat meeting we are planning to have bimonthly community meetings. The objective is to keep the discussion going on new Openbravo ERP developments and discuss the topics that you consider important related to Openbravo ERP and Openbravo POS product and community processes.

Here you have all the information for the second meeting:

Date: 22nd of January at 14.00 GMT
Where: IRC Network FreeNode at the #openbravo channel
Language: English

Please, if you are planning 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.